Miss  America 


MISS  AMERICA 

PEN  AND  CAMERA  SKETCHES 
OF  THE  AMERICAN  GIRL 

BY 

ALEXANDER  BLACK 

Author  of  "Miss  Jerry  "  etc. 

WITH  DESIGNS  AND  PHO- 
TOGRAPHIC ILLUSTRA- 
TIONS BY  THE  AUTHOR 


CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 
NEW  YORK:  M  DCCC  XC  VIII 


Copyright,  i8g8,  by 

Charles  Scribner's  Sons 

All  rights  reserved 


Santoctsit)?  prejtftf : 

John  Wilson  and  Son,  Cambridge,  U.  S.  A. 


TO 


THE  AMERICAN  GIRL  WHOM 
I  HAVE  KNOWN  BEST 

MY  WIFE 

THIS  BOOK  IS  GRATEFULLY 
AND  AFFECTIONATELY 
DEDICATED 


^rAroLocy; 


T  will  be  suspected,  perhaps,  that  in 
saying  "  sketches"  I  have  wished  to 
escape  some  of  the  responsibility  which 
might  have  been  incurred  by  a  tnore  formal 
approach  to  a  momentous  theme,  though  the 
entire  truth  of  the  description  should  carry 
its  own  justification.  And  if  the  term 
be  permitted  in  describing  the  text,  it  has 
equal  appropriateness  in  describing  the 
pictures;  for  the  photograph  seldom  can 
be  more  than  a  sketch,  and  must  be  content 
with  the  limitations  as  well  as  with  the 
privileges  of  the  sketch.  The  feminine 
eye  will  discern  unaided  by  data  the 


The  Apology 


chronological  range  of  my  pictures.  To 
other  eyes,  possibly,  J  should  explain  that 
the  portraits  represent  a  period  of  six 
or  seven  years,  and  that  those  in  conven- 
tional dress  are  supplemented  by  various 
costume  sketches  with  the  camera  recalling 
eras  in  which  there  was  ?io  photography . 
What  I  have  said  of  the  American  type 
in  the  first  chapter  will  explain  my  own 
difficulty  in  expressing  the  A?nerican  type 
by  the  aid  of  the  lens,  a  difficulty  which 
has  not  been  diminished  by  the  privilege 
of  wide  travel.  If  I  have  not  revealed 
the  geographical  identity  of  any  of 
the  types  refected  here,  the  reservatioii 
may,  I  hope,  seem  to  be  as  fully  justified 
as  certain  other  reservations  which  the 
A?nerican  girl  herself  so  frequently  chooses 
to  hold. 


The  Apology 


/  often  have  wished  that  it  were  easier 
to  substitute  for  "American"  some  name 
which  should  more  specifically  indicate  the 
United  States.  It  is  the  United  States 
girl  I  am  talking  about ;  it  is  the  United 
States  spirit  which  I  have  sought  to 
discover,  and  not  the  spirit  of  the  wider 
America  of  which  the  foreigner,  and  even 
the  British  foreigner,  so  frequently,  and 
so  reasonably,  seems  to  be  thinking  when 
he  uses  the  name  "American."  Now  that 
Miss  America  for  the  first  time  has  seen 
her  soldier  brothers  go  abroad  to  fight  and 
to  conquer,  it  may  be  that  in  one  way  or 
another  there  will  be  a  further  modifica- 
tion of  the  term,  in  which  direction  it 
would  be  difficult  to  say  at  this  hour. 

Because  this  is  an  apology  and  not  a 
mere  preface,  I  may  be  permitted,  I  hope, 


The  Apology 


to  express  to  the  American  girls  in  various 
States  of  the  Union,  from  Boston  to  San 
Antonio,  who  have  sat  bef  ore  my  camera, 
my  regret  that  I  should  have  translated 
them  so  inadequately .  It  would,  indeed, 
be  hard  to  do  justice  to  the  American  girl, 
and  one  well  might  hesitate  to  describe, 
or  even  to  discuss  her,  were  not  her 
always  gracious  generosity  so  safely  to 
be  looked  for. 

A.  B. 


I 


THE  AMERICAN  TYPE 

THE  tradition  that  the 
women  of  the  region 
in  which  we  live  illustrate 
all  of  those  traits  that  give 
an  abiding  charm  to  the 
sex,  is  one  that  sometimes 
may  be  unreasonable,  per- 
haps even  comic ;  yet  it 
cannot  be  discreditable. 
Balzac,  who  remarks  some- 
where that  nothing  unites 
men  so  much  as  a  certain 
conformity  of  view  in  the  matter  of  women,  may 
seem  unphilosophical  when  he  remarks  somewhere 
else  upon  the  absurdity  of  English  women.  His 
French  antipathy  has  an  unreasonably  affirmative 
sting.  But  we  do  not  care  how  many  Thackerays 
regard  the  English  girl  as  the  bright  particular 
flower  of  creation.  We  like  and  expect  the  author 
i  i 


Miss  America 


of  "  The  Newcomes "  to  say  :  "  I  think  it  is  not 
national  prejudice  which  makes  me  believe  that  a 
high-bred  English  lady  is  the  most  complete  of  all 
Heaven's  subjects  in  this  world."  For  the  same 
reason  we  delight  in  N.  P.  Willis's  confidence 
when  he  declares  that  "  there  is  no  such  beautiful 
work  under  the  sky  as  an  American  girl  in  her 
bellehood."  And  Mr.  Willis  adds  with  the  same 
whimsical  consciousness  of  national  partiality  :  "  I 
think  I  am  not  prejudiced." 

Of  course  this  instinctive  preference  is  fundamen- 
tal. We  are  prepared  to  hear  from  science  that  the 
African  savage  prefers  the  thick  lips  and  flat  nose 
of  the  African  girl  to  any  other  sort ;  that  this  is 
why  the  African  girl  has  a  flat  nose  and  thick  lips ; 
that  gallantry  is  a  phase  of  natural  selection,  and  so 
on.  We  can  understand  that  there  is  a  merely 
relative  difference  of  attitude  between  the  savage 
lover  who  woos  his  lady  with  a  club,  and  the  modern 
suitor  who  swears  to  give  up  all  of  his  clubs  for 
her  sake.  What  perplexes  us  is  our  anxiety  to 
explain  our  modern  instinct,  and  (what  is  more  per- 
plexing) our  anxiety  to  explain  her;  to  ascertain 
and  even  to  catalogue  her  essential  traits  —  to  dis- 
cover, if  not  why  we  prefer  the  American  girl,  at 
least  what  manner  of  girl  it  is  that  we  thus  are 
instinctively  preferring. 

What  is  the  American  type  ?  Is  the  typical  Amer- 
ican girl  as  the  British  novelist  so  often  has  described 
her  —  rich,  noisy,  wasp-waisted  and  slangy  ?  Is  she 
a  "  Daisy  Miller"  or  a  "  Fair  Barbarian  "  ?    Is  she 

2 


The  American  Type 

what  Richard  Grant  White  feared  she  too  often 
was,  "a  creature  composed  in  equal  parts  of  mind 
and  leather"  ?  Is  she  Emerson's  "Fourth  of  July 
of  Zoology,"  or  is  she  illustrating  the  discovery 
which  Irving  claimed  to  have  made  among  cer- 
tain philosophers  "  that 
all  animals  degenerate  in 
America  and  man  among 
the  number  "  ? 

From  those  foreigners 
who  make  a  Cook's  tour 
examination  of  us,  the  evi- 
dence in  favor  of  the  pro- 
position that  we  grow 
more  pretty  and  witty 
women  to  the  acre  than 
any  other  country  in  the 
world,  is  overwhelming. 
But  there  are  obvious  rea- 
sons why  we  must  distrust 
this  foreign  comment. 
Too  often  it  plainly  is  a 
propitiatory  item,  when  it 
is  not  illustrating  a  flip- 
pant wish  among  men 
writers  to  occupy  Disraeli's  position  "  on  the  side 
of  the  angels."  That  traveller  has  a  profound  dis- 
taste for  a  country  who  does  not  find  that  it  has 
pretty  women. 

If  anything  is  more  inevitable  than  this,  it  is  that 
the  traveller  will  find  fault  with  the  type  preferred 

3 


Miss  America 


by  the  men  of  the  country  he  is  visiting.  "  What 
is  most  amazing,"  says  the  observer  in  Zululand  or 
elsewhere,  "  is  that  the  prettiest  women,  the  women 
without  this  or  that  hideous  deformity,  are  not 
admired  by  the  men."  The  Kaffir  prince  on  a  visit 
to  England,  or  the  Apache  chief  among  the  pale- 
faces in  the  city  of  the  Great  Father,  invariably  are 
astounded  at  the  obtuseness  of  the  white  men.  I 
remember  once  listening  to  a  group  of  New  York 
artists  who  were  discussing  preferred  types  of  women, 
and  it  was  agreed,  with  a  hopeless  and  resentful 
unanimity,  that  most  New  Yorkers  preferred  fat 
women,  since  most  of  the  good  clothes  and  diamonds 
were  worn  by  fat  women.  All  of  which  goes  to 
show,  perhaps,  that  natural  selection  is  an  exclusive 
affair. 

Probably  even  patriotism  does  not  demand  of  us 
an  admiration  for  the  beauty  of  the  very  first 
American  girls  —  the  dusky  darlings  of  our  primi- 
tive tribes.  These  earliest  American  girls  were  not 
dowered  with  the  fatal  gift  of  beauty  as  we  under- 
stand beauty.  Indeed,  it  is  quite  generally  ad- 
mitted that  the  American  Indian  girl  is  not  and 
never  was  so  pretty  as  the  girls  of  some  of  the 
Pacific  islands,  for  example.  Far  be  it  from  me  to 
attack  any  precious  traditions  concerning  the  red 
man,  or  the  red  woman,  either.  Far  be  it  from 
me  to  touch  with  impious  hand  the  romantic  pan- 
oply of  Pocahontas.  I  am  not  writing  a  scientific 
treatise.  I  have  no  point  to  prove.  It  is  quite 
possible  that  there  is  something  distinctive  in  the 

4 


The  American  Type 

personality  of  the  Indian  girl,  whether  she  be 
as  poetry  has  painted  her  or  as  she  stands  in  the 
analysis  of  science.  If  I  pass  her  by  it  is  in  no 
spirit  of  partisanship  toward  either  view.  She  is  an 
old  story,  and  some  day  when  she  is  a  new  story 
we  may  have  occasion  for  surprise. 

The  fact  is  that  I  must  content  myself  here  with 
a  glance  at  the  American  girl  of  more  recent  times, 
though  she  also  will  seem  to  be  an  old  story  if  we 
permit  ourselves  to  remember  the  number  of  things 
which  have  been  said.  We  are  not  likely  to  forget 
the  unction  with  which  foreign  visitors  sketched  the 
daughters  of  Colonial  America.  Indeed,  we  are  in 
a  measure  dependent  upon  those  sketches  for  a 
knowledge  of  these  ancestral  daughters.  As  in  all 
judgments  of  remote  appearances,  we  here  must  lean 
upon  mere  opinion.  There  was  no  camera  in  the 
days  of  Priscilla,  nor  in  the  days  of  Dolly  Madison, 
and  painted  portraiture,  unchallenged  by  the  photo- 
graph, had  reached  heights  of  admirable  gallantry. 
For  purposes  of  pictorial  reconstruction  we  have  an 
enthusiastic  description,  the  dubious  confessions  of 
a  diary,  a  charming  little  miniature  or  a  mellowing 
canvas  in  an  old  frame,  a  quaint  gown,  wrinkled  by 
time  ;  but  we  have  no  photograph.  I  hear  the 
Romanticist  mutter,  "Thank  Heaven  for  that!''' 
Alas  !  the  photograph  is  an  expert  witness,  and  how 
he. can  disagree  !  Was  ever  any  human  specialist 
on  the  witness  stand  so  dogmatic,  so  insinuating, 
so  sophistical  as  the  photograph  ?  Who,  without 
an   obstinately  anthropological  mind,  shall  regret 

7 


Miss  America 


that  the  beginnings  of  our  national  life  are  veiled  in 
the  Ante-Photographic  era  —  that  we  may  invest 
them  with  qualities  we  wish  they  might  have  had, 
as  well  as  with  those  qualities  of  which  we  think 
we  know  ?  Who  shall  say  that  humanity,  A.  P., 
dwelling  in  a  softening  haze  beyond  the  harshly 
illuminated  era  of  Realism,  is  worse  off  than  hu- 
manity thereafter  ?  Looking  at  the  matter  practi- 
cally, who  shall  regret  that  Lady  Washington  never 
had  her  pretty  head  in  a  vise,  her  face  masked  a 
ghastly  white  with  powder  to  make  her  countenance 
more  actinic,  and  her  eyes  instructed  to  glare  at  a 
fixed  point  for  upward  of  sixty  mortal  seconds  ! 
Surely  there  are  some  compensations  in  being 
handed  down  like  the  Iliad  or  the  masonic  ritual 
by  word  of  mouth  rather  than  by  agencies  as- 
sociated with  the  arrogant  stare  of  the  lens. 

But,  after  all,  we  do  not  conduct  the  trial  wholly 
with  expert  witnesses,  and  the  camera  has  been  a 
useful  commentator — perhaps  we  are  more  willing 
to  say  that  it  will  be  than  that  it  has  been,  though 
we  never  shall  surpass  in  delicately  literal  perfection 
the  image  of  the  daguerreotype.  A  new  confusion 
may  arise  from  the  fact  that  photography  wants  to 
be  more  than  a  science  —  is  tired  of  being  literal, 
and  seeks  to  be  an  art.  If  it  shall  become  an  art 
—  that  is  to  say,  an  agency  of  personal  opinion  — 
posterity  must,  like  ourselves,  go  on  being  in- 
fluenced in  its  judgments  of  pictorial  fact  by  the 
expressions  of  art,  which  the  world  has  been  doing 
from  the  beginning  of  time. 


The  American  Type 


Certainly  it  would  be  very  hard  for  us  to  think 
of  the  English  girl,  for  example,  however  well  we 
might  know  her  personally,  without  feeling  the 


influence  of  the  English  artists,  of  Romney,  and 
Reynolds,  and  Sir  John  Millais,  and  Sir  Frederick 
Leighton,  and  the  multitudinous  expressions  of  her 
from   the  pencil  of  the  author  of  "  Trilby."  Du 

9 


Miss  America 


Maurier's  English  girl  is  an  image,  agreeable  or 
not  according  to  one's  taste,  which  we  cannot  get 
out  of  our  minds.  A  number  of  years  before  he 
achieved  a  second  fame  by  writing  romances,  Du 
Maurier  made  a  sketch  in  which  he  undertook  to 
indicate  his  idea  of  a  pretty  woman.  He  wrote  of 
his  ideal  at  that  time  :  "  She  is  rather  tall,  I  admit, 
and  a  trifle  stiff ;  but  English  women  are  tall  and 

stiff  just  now  ;  and  she  is 
rather  too  serious;  but 
that  is  only  because  I  find 
it  so  difficult,  with  a  mere 
stroke  of  black  ink,  to  in- 
lf/*  dicate  the  enchanting  little 
curved  lines  that  go  from 
the  nose  to  the  mouth  cor- 
ners, causing  the  cheeks  to 
make  a  smile  —  and  with- 
out them  the  smile  is  in- 
complete." I  always  have 
been  glad  to  hear  Mr.  Rus- 
kin  say  of  the  Venus  of  Melos,  with  her  "tranquil, 
regular  and  lofty  features,"  that  she  "could  not  hold 
her  own  for  a  moment  against  the  beauty  ot  a 
simple  English  girl,  of  pure  race  and  kind  heart." 

And  in  the  same  way  our  notion  of  the  American 
girl,  of  the  typical  American  girl,  is  inevitably  af- 
fected by  the  pictures  we  see  of  her.  Our  illustra- 
tors naturally  have  the  best  opportunity  to  mould 
our  judgments  in  this  matter.  I  recall  hearing  one 
woman  say  of  another  at  a  tea :   "  That  girl  is 

i  o 


The  American  Type 


always  sitting  around   in   Gibson   poses."  They 
used  to  say  the  same  thing  in  England  of  the  girls 
who  imitated  Du  Maurier.    Thus  we  see  that  the 
illustrator  of  life  not 
only  is  reflecting  but 
creating  forms  and 
manners  ;    and  if 
you  would  know 
not  merely  what  the 
American  girl  is,  but 
what  she  is  going  to 
be,  study  the  picture- 
makers  and  story- 
makers  who  influ- 
ence her. 

Mr.  Gibson  would 
have  us  believe  that 
Miss  America  is  es- 
sentially a  statuesque 
girl,  that,  in  gen- 
eral, there  are  good 
chances  that  she  will 
be  tall,  commanding, 
well-dressed,  rather 
English  in  the  shoul- 
ders. Mr.  Wenzell 
and  Mr.  Smedley 
present  her  to  us  as 
more  willowy,  with  more  of  what,  if  we  had  to  go 
abroad  for  a  prototype,  we  should  be  obliged  to 
call  French  grace  and  lightness.    We  have  been 

1 1 


Miss  America 

under  the  spell  of  the  girl  Castaigne  can  draw, 
have  enjoyed  the  dainty  femininity  pictured  by 
Toaspern  and  Sterner  and   Mrs.  Stephens.  None 


has  grudged  a  flattering  stroke,  a  prophetic  outline. 
It  is  the  old  story.  If  we  are  to  measure  a  nation's 
civilization  by  the  degree  of  its  deference  to  women, 
we  surely  shall  find  much  to  confuse  us  in  art,  which 
in  all  lands,  like  some  joyous,  enthusiastic  child, 

I  2 


The  American  Type 


always  has  heaped  unstinted  homage  at  the  feet  of 
its  goddesses,  its  Madonnas,  its  Magdalens  and  its 
nymphs ;  which  always  has  been  ready  to  give  to  its 
fruit-venders  and  flower-girls  in  the  market-place  the 
same  refined  beauty  it  bestows  upon  its  princesses ; 
which  has  made  its  Pandoras  beautiful  with  no  sign 
of  resentment  for  any  mischief  its  Pandoras  ever 
may  have  done,  grateful  only  for  the  privilege  of 
saying  to  the  world  as  to  her  precious  private  self, 
that  she  is  very  charming  indeed.  Germany,  while 
sending  women  to  the  plough,  paints  her  radiantly 
as  a  deity,  and  when  England  was  selling  wives  at 
the  end  of  a  halter  in  the  market-place,  there  was 
no  abatement  in  the  ardor  of  her  artistic  tributes  to 
feminine  loveliness. 

While  the  American  artist  has  painted  Miss 
America  appreciatively,  with  an  enthusiasm  credit- 
able alike  to  his  art  and  to  his  patriotism,  and 
seldom,  surely,  in  the  spirit  of  one  who  could  say, 
"  she  is  rather  stiff"  just  now,"  unquestionably,  like 
the  rest  of  us,  he  has  been  bothered  at  times  by  the 
fact  that  she  is  so  various,  that  she  has  so  many 
pictorial  as  well  as  temperamental  and  (may  I  say) 
vocal  variations. 

There  are  several  reasons  why  she  should  be 
various.  The  "  Mayflower  "  was  a  small  ship  and 
could  not  hold  all  of  our  ancestors.  Like  the 
English  who  followed  after  the  Conqueror,  some 
of  our  ancestors  had  to  be  content  to  "  come  over  " 
at  a  later  time,  some  of  them  at  a  shockingly  recent 
date.    Thus  we  have  greater  divergences  in  type 

13 


Miss  America 


than  exist  in  countries  wherein  the  "coming  over" 
process  was  neither  so  protracted  nor  from  so  many- 
points  of  the  compass.  The  American  girl  blos- 
soms like  the  pansy  in  so  many  and  in  such  unex- 
pected shades  and  combinations  that  science  falters, 
and  bewildered  art,  determined  to  paint  types  that 
will  "  stay  put,"  bolts  for  Brittany  and  sulkily 
draws  sabots  and  the  Norman  nose.  We  are  a  vast 
anthropological  department  store  in  which  the  polite 
sociological  clerk  will  show  you  human  goods,  not 
only  in  the  primary  colors,  but  in  every  conceivable 
tint  and  texture ;  and  when  you  ask  him,  Is  this 
foreign  or  domestic  ?  he  lies  to  meet  the  require- 
ments. Yes,  Miss  America  sometimes,  like  our 
cotton,  "comes  over  "  a  second  time  with  a  foreign 
label,  which  is  puzzling  ! 

It  is  our  habit  to  think  that  the  American  girl  of 
English  ancestry  presents  precisely  the  right  modi- 
fication of  the  —  what  shall  I  call  it?  —  austerity  of 
the  purely  English  type,  and  which  scorns  the 
melancholy  of  Burne-Jones  and  Rossetti.  The 
American  girl  of  German  parents  is  conspicuously 
with  us,  and  very  often  is  found  supplying  a  fascin- 
atingly fair  phase  without  which  our  galaxy  scarcely 
would  be  complete,  adding  a  delightful  sparkle  to 
the  demureness  which  we  might  not  find  so  modi- 
fied in  Berlin  or  Bremen.  The  American  girl  of 
French  parentage  is  found  uniting  the  traits  of  the 
people  which  has  produced  De  Stael,  and  Recamier 
and  George  Sand,  to  the  perhaps  not  greatly  differ- 
ent vivacity  of  l'Americaine.    We  trace  the  auburn 

H 


The  American  Type 

tresses  of  the  Scottish  lass,  the  teasing  Irish  eyes, 
the  winsome  oval  of  the  Dutch  face.  We  see  the 
too  emphatic  contrasts  of  the  Spanish,  the  Italian 
and  the  Russian  types  mellowed  and  refined  ;  while 
Oriental  blood,  the  civilized  African,  the  octoroon 
and  the  occasional  Asiatic  each  add  an  element  of 
picturesque  variety. 

And  this  is  not  saying  a  word  about  the  differen- 
tiating fact  that  this  is  a  big  country,  and  that  Miss 
America  in  one  section  is  by  no  means  the  same  as 
Miss  America  in  another.  I  do  not  mean  to  say 
that  when  we  meet  her  in  or  from  Boston  we  always 
know  her  by  sight,  but  when  we  come  to  average 
her  in  that  neighborhood  we  are  able  to  see  clearly 
enough  that  her  quality  is  distinctive,  that  it  is  dif- 
ferent from  the  quality  of  Miss  America  elsewhere 
—  in  New  York,  for  example,  where,  by  a  trivial 
tradition,  she  is  supposed  to  lav  less  stress  upon 
intellectuality,  but  where,  under  whatever  guise  of 
habit  or  manner,  you  will  find  that  she  knows 
enough  and  has  what  she  knows  sufficiently  at  her 
command  to  make  you  nervous.  Again,  the  Phila- 
delphia girl  upsets  your  preconceived  notions,  if 
you  are  foolish  enough  to  have  these,  by  being 
nothing  that  suggests  even  remote  relationship  to 
the  bronze  Ouaker  on  the  municipal  tower.  It  is 
the  familiar  joke  that  the  Boston  girl  asks  what  you 
know,  that  the  New  York  girl  asks  what  you  own, 
and  that  the  Philadelphia  girl  asks  who  your  grand- 
father was.  If  this  amiable  satire  should  have  any 
foundation  in  fact,  I  wonder  what  the  Chicago  girl 


Miss  America 


is  expected  to  ask.  I  myself  have  a  theory,  not 
wholly  dissociated  from  experience,  that  she  does 
not  ask  anything,  being  content  to  know  that  she, 
personifying  the  great  traditionless  middle  west, 
has  been  called  the  hardest  riddle  of  them  all. 

And,  as  I  have  said,  we  must  admit  that  geog- 
raphy has  much  to  do  with  the  case.  Does  any 
one  deny  that  climate  and  history  have  made  the 
Kentucky  girl  a  being  apart — that  the  Kentucky 
horses  which  she  has  ridden  with  so  much  spirit 
have  had  their  effect  in  her  whole  style  and  person- 
ality ?  Could  we  fail  to  look  for  a  distinctive 
flowering  in  the  verdant  slopes  beyond  the  Sierras 
or  amid  that  intensely  American  human  environ- 
ment on  the  plains  of  Texas  ?  Have  you  heard 
the  Creole  sing  ?  Have  you  heard  the  music  of  the 
Georgia  girl's  talk  ?  Have  you  ever  let  a  Virginia 
girl  drive  you,  or  danced  with  Miss  Maryland  ? 

A  southern  dance  !  Perhaps  it  is  inevitable  that 
we  should  find  ourselves  thinking  of  the  Conti- 
nental and  early  Federal  society  ;  of  old  George- 
town and  the  powdered  heads,  and  the  minuet,  and 
the  blinking  candles  behind  the  darkey  orchestra; 
of  the  clinking  swords  of  the  young  Revolutionary 
soldiers,  and  the  satin  breeches  of  the  foreign  lord- 
lings,  studying  the  precocious  young  republic  and 
the  young  republic's  daughters :  of  the  quaint 
gowns  Miss  America  used  to  wear,  and  the  taunting 
little  caps  and  head-dresses,  reflecting  now  the 
whimsies  of  the  Empire,  now  the  furbelows  of  the 
Restoration,  and  always  her  engagingly  different 

16 


The  American  Type 


self.  Yes,  time  is  working  its  wizard  tricks  up  and 
down  the  land,  slowly  here  and  quickly  there,  now 
(as  it  might  seem)  in  a  romantic  spirit,  and  again 
in  brusque  paradoxical  contrast  to  the  thing  we 
expect. 

We  live  quickly  hereabouts,  and  to  say  that  the 
vast  changes  which  have  taken  place  in  our  national 
life  have  been  mostly  external  is  not  to  say  that  the 
spectacle  is  on  that  account  any  easier  to  under- 
stand. In  an  especial  degree  social  situation  with 
us,  like  the  age  limit  defining  old  maids,  is  wholly 
relative,  subject  to  continual  change.  To  the 
foreign  spectator  who  ignores  this  relativity,  the 
American  girl  naturally  is  bewildering,  and  we  are 
likely  to  find  her  typified  in  foreign  comment  in 
the  words  which  Schlegel  irreverently  applied  to 
Portia,  as  a  "  rich,  beautiful,  clever  heiress."  No, 
the  typical  American  girls  are  not  all  heiresses,  nor 
all  cow-camp  heroines.  They  were  not  always  de- 
mure in  the  colonies,  nor  are  they  always  discon- 
certingly self-possessed  in  our  own  time.  The  girls 
with  whom  Lafayette  went  sled-riding  on  the  New- 
burg  hills  do  not  actually  appear  to  have  been 
amazingly  different  from  those  who  teased  the 
Prince  of  Wales  in  the  fifties  (I  mean  our  fifties), 
nor  from  those  who  sent  in  their  cards  to  Li  Hung 
Chang  in  the  nineties.  It  is  very  shocking  to  us 
moderns,  who  let  women  preach  and  plead  and 
vote,  to  learn  of  the  number  of  elopements  in  the 
days  when  women  were  theoretically  tethered  to  the 
spinning-wheel  and  forbidden  everything  but  hypoc- 

19 


Miss  America 


risy.  Which  is  to  say,  perhaps,  that  how  much 
we  shall  regard  as  distinctive  in  the  modern  woman 
may  depend  upon  how  little  we  happen  to  know  of 
the  woman  who  has  gone  before. 

But  time  and  place  must  leave  their  mark,  and 
Miss  America,  though  she  be  like  changeable  silk, 
of  varying  hue  in  varying  lights,  is  undoubtedly, 
being  the  precocious  product  of  a  new  era  in  new 
territory,  a  new  variety  in  the  species,  as  new  as  if 
she  were  grotesquely  instead  of  subtly  different. 
And  in  her  presence  the  American  himself  fre- 
quently seems  to  be  awed  and  quelled,  like  the 
Greek  hero  when  Athena's  "  dreadful  eyes  shone 
upon  him."  His  devotion  to  her  has  excited  de- 
rision ;  his  deference  has  been  misconstrued,  his 
boastful  admiration  has  been  catalogued  as  charac- 
teristic. Italy  once  spoke  of  England  as  "  the 
paradise  of  women  "  ;  and  England  in  a  later  day 
began  to  say  the  same  thing  about  the  United 
States,  which  may  or  may  not  have  something  to 
do  with  the  "  star  of  empire,"  and  probably,  in  any 
case,  has  some  definite  relation  to  the  Anglo-Saxon 
spirit,  concerning  which  so  much  has  been  said  of 
late.  As  for  Miss  America  herself,  the  sovereignty 
at  which  the  foreign  observer  marvels  is  a  real 
appearance,  however  profound  the  misapprehension 
of  its  philosophy.  Miss  America  is  no  illusion,  if 
some  spectators  have  doubted  their  senses. 

By  the  grace  of  nature  she  is  that  she  is.  If  the 
American  man  continues  to  pay  her  the  supreme 
compliment  of  not  understanding  her,  that  is  his 

20 


The  American  Type 

affair.  It  always  is  easier  to  perceive  the  other's 
folly  than  our  own  —  especially  when  the  exciting 


cause  is  a  woman.  We  know  better  than  the 
spectator  why  we  permit  certain  seeming  tyrannies  ! 
We  analyze  the  American  girl  in  a  purely  Pick- 


Miss  America 


wickian  spirit,  not  because  we  expect  actually  to 
discover  facts,  but  for  the  immediate  pleasure  of  the 
speculation.  We  neither  seek  nor  assume  to  com- 
prehend this  marvellous  organism.  We  know 
better.  When  we  pretend  to  delineate  the  Ameri- 
can girl  it  is  in  the  spirit  of  Fielding's  aside  in  "  Tom 
Jones":  "We  mention  this  observation  not  with 
any  view  of  pretending  to  account  for  so  odd  a 
behavior,  but  lest  some  critic  should  hereafter  plume 
himself  on  discovering  it." 


22 


II 


THE  TWIG 


AS  I  said  one  day  to  the 
F 


Professor  — 
jBhhP*  But  first  I  must  tell  you 

about  the  Professor.  She  is 
a  young  woman  —  young 
even  in  an  era  that  classes 
authors  amongthe  "younger 
writers"  until  they  are  sixty, 
and  is  pushing  the  "  proper 
age  at  which  to  marry"  into 
the  period  of  severe  and  un- 
debatable  maturity.  She  is 
young,  but  she  exemplifies 
that  educated  precocity  tol- 
erated and  fostered  by  our 
jfc^y  era-     She  knows  the  past 

like  a  book  and  the  pres- 
ent like  a  man.  She  does  not  vulgarly  bristle  with 
knowledge  like  the  first  products  of  the  higher 
education.  Her  acquirements  sit  upon  her  less  like 
starched  linen  than  like  a  silken  gown  that  flows 

23 


Miss  America 


with  the  figure.  She  is  the  educated  woman  in  her 
"second  manner,"  as  the  art  critics  would  say.  I  do 
not  know  what  the  educated  woman's  third  manner 
will  be.  No  one  acquainted  with  the  charms  of 
the  Professor  could  help  hoping  that  there  never 
would  be  any. 

The  Professor  graduated  and  post-graduated. 
She  pottered  in  laboratories,  and  at  certain  inter- 
vals wholly  disappeared  into  the  very  abysses  of 
science.  She  read  law  tentatively,  and  made  a  feint 
at  going  into  medicine,  but  was  deterred  in  each 
case,  I  fancy,  by  the  fact,  repugnant  to  her  exuber- 
ant energy,  that  a  practice  had  to  grow  and  could 
not  be  mastered  ready  made.  At  one  time  there 
were  both  hopes  and  fears  that  she  would  enter  the 
ministry.  Those  who  hoped  banked  on  her  earn- 
estness and  wisdom.  Those  who  feared  quailed 
before  her  ruthless  independence  and  sense  of 
humor.  She  delighted  in  the  paradox  of  not  scorn- 
ing social  life,  welcoming  Emerson's  admonition  with 
regard  to  solitude  and  society  by  keeping  her  head 
in  one  and  her  hands  in  the  other.  Indeed,  she 
dances  remarkably  well  when  we  consider  that  here 
the  dexterity  is  so  far  removed  from  the  brain,  and 
I  have  seen  her  swim  like  —  a  mermaid,  I  suppose. 
She  took  a  long  course  in  cookery  for  the  pleasure 
of  more  pungently  abusing  certain  of  her  lecture 
audiences.  One  day  when  the  plumbers  did  n't 
come  I  saw  her  actually  "wipe  a  joint"  in  lead  pipe 
with  her  own  hands.  Heaven  knows  where  she 
picked  that  up  ! 

24 


The  Twig 


When  she  accepted  the  position  at  the  Academy, 
doubtless  it  was  with  a  view  to  certain  liberties  of 
action  in  the  sociological  direction.  She  was  not 
quite  through  with  the  college  settlement  idea,  and 
I  suspect  that  she  had  a  feeling  that  city  politics  at 
close  range  might  be  productive  to  her  in  certain 
ways.  Because  she  is  neither  erratic  nor  formidable, 
she  has  experienced  various  offers  of  marriage,  and 
'  has  shed  them  all  without  visible  disturbance.  Just 
at  present,  panoplied  in  learning,  tingling  with 
modernity,  yet  always  charmingly  unconscious  of 
her  power,  she  stands,  poised  and  easy,  like  a 
sparrow  on  a  live  wire. 

In  other  words  the  Professor  is  one  of  those  rare 
women  with  whom  you  may  enjoy  the  delights  of  a 
purely  impersonal  quarrel.  She  can  wrangle  affec- 
tionately and  cleave  you  in  twain  with  a  tender 
sisterly  smile.  Indeed,  she  can  make  you  feel  of 
intellectual  fisticuffs,  and,  notwithstanding  an  occa- 
sional effect  of  too  greatly  accentuated  excitement, 
that  it  is,  on  the  whole,  a  superior  pleasure.  And 
you  arise  again  conscious  that  she  has  no  greater 
immediate  grudge  against  you  than  against  St.  Paul 
or  any  other  of  her  historical  opponents. 

One  day  I  asked  the  Professor,  not  with  any  con- 
troversial inflection,  what  she  thought  of  Herbert 
Spencer,  a  bachelor,  talking  about  the  rearing  of 
children. 

"  Well,"  said  the  Professor,  "  it  certainly  is  no 
more  absurd  than  the  spectacle  of  Herbert  Spencer 
analyzing  love,  or  Ernest  Renan  doing  the  same 
thing."  25 


Miss  America 


"  Mind  you,"  I  went  on,  "  I  don't  say  that 
the  unmarried  may  not  discuss  with  entire  compe- 
tency —  " 

"  I  hope  not,"  interrupted  the  Professor.  "  I 
hope  you  would  n't  say  any  such  absurd  thing. 

Must  a  man  have 
robbed  a  bank  to 
write  intelligently 
of  penology  ?  " 

"  My  point  is,"  I 
went  on — the  Pro- 
fessor and  I  never 
take  the  slightest 
offence  at  each 
other's  interrup- 
tions—  "my  point 
is  that  it  almost 
seems  at  times  as 
if  the  unmarried 
should,  in  such  an 
emergency,  assume, 
if  they  did  not  feel, 
a  certain  diffidence. 
To  tell  you  the 
truth,  Professor,  if  it  were  not  for  you,  I  should 
doubt  whether  the  unmarried  had  a  developed 
sense  of  humor." 

"  That  is  simply  pitiful,"  flung  the  Professor. 
"  Can  you  not  see  that  it  is  a  sense  of  humor  that 
keeps  many  people  from  marrying  ?  But  that  is 
not  the  point.    Who  is  better  fitted  than  Mr. 

26 


The  Twig 


■ 


Spencer,  who  has  enjoyed  freedom  from  an  entang- 
ling alliance,  who  is  unbiased  by  social  situation  or 
personal  obligation,  to  discuss  with  scientific  judi- 
cially the  problems  of  child-rearing?" 

"  Theoretically,  Professor,  that  is  all  right.  But 
when  Mr.  Spencer  advises  more  sugar,  it  is  awfully 
hard  to  forget  that  Mr.  Spencer  never,  presum- 
ably never,  sat  up  nights  with  a 
youngster  who  had  the  tooth- 
ache. It  is  all  very  well  for 
Mr.  Spencer  to  suggest  that 
when  a  child  craves  more  sugar 
it  probably  needs  more  sugar, 
but  the  parent  who  manages  his 
offspring  on  that  basis  is  going 
to  lose  sleep.  A  good  rule,  if 
you  will  permit  me  a  platitude, 
is  a  rule  that  works.  The  way 
that  children  should  be  brought 
up  is  the  way  they  can  be 
brought  up." 

"  My  friend,"  said  the  Pro- 
fessor — 

Now,  I  am  several  years  older  than  the  Professor. 
By  sheer  age  I  am  entitled  to  her  deference  ;  but 
the  Professor  can  ignore  years  as  well  as  sex  or 
previous  condition  of  servitude.  Her  impersonality 
is  adjusted  to  time,  to  space,  and  to  matter.  I  am 
simply  a  Person. 

"  My  friend,"  said  the  Professor,  "  it  is  another 
platitude  that  there  is  a  right  way  to  do  everything, 

27 


Miss  America 


even  to  bring  up  children.  The  way  children  are 
brought  up  probably  is  not  right,  and  no  theory  or 
method  of  bringing  them  up  is,  of  course,  or  could 
be  more  than  relatively  right.  But  in  getting  as 
near  the  right  as  we  humanly  may  there  is  no 
wisdom  in  despising  the  advice  of  the  spectator. 
The  man  digging  a  hole  in  the  ground  may  be  less 
competent  than  a  man  not  in  the  hole  to  perceive 
that  presently  the  earth  is  going  to  cave  in.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  old  maids,  for  example,  have  been 
known  to  bring  up  children  very  well  indeed,  for 
the  reason,  possibly,  that  nothing  is  more  detri- 
mental to  successful  authority  over  children  than 
relationship  to  them.  All  experience  shows  that 
the  scientific,  the  abstract  management  of  children 
is  more  successful,  in  the  average,  than  the  tradi- 
tional parental  method.  This  scientific  method,  I 
need  not  say,  is  not  less  kindly  than  the  other  ;  it 
actually  is  more  kindly.  Witness  the  absolute 
triumph  of  kindergartens  —  " 

"  Now,  Professor,"  I  interposed,  foreseeing  the 
spectacle  of  Froebel  and  Plato  moving  down  arm- 
in-arm  between  the  Professor's  periods,  "  under- 
stand me  —  " 

"  A  very  difficult  thing  at  times,"  she  murmured. 

"  Understand  me —  I  am  speaking  now  with  my 
eye  on  the  American  child." 

"  And  that"  twinkled  the  Professor,  "  requires 
some  dexterity." 

"  The  American  child,"  I  pursued,  "  is  accused 
by  many  of  threatening  our  destruction,  and  if  the 

28 


The  Twig 


American  view  of  rearing  children  is  wrong  or  re- 
quires modification,  this  radical  suggestion  of  Mr. 
Spencer,  looking  to  greater  rather  than  less  liberty 
in  making  terms  with  the  instincts  of  children,  be- 
comes a  matter  for  serious  concern.  If  the  Ameri- 
can idea  has  stood  for  anything  it  is  more  sugar  — 
that  is  to  say,  yielding  something  to  the  instinct, 
the  personality  of  the  child.  I  think  we  have  gone 
a  long  way  with  it.  Our  children  are  becoming 
very  self-possessed.  Sometimes  I  have  qualms. 
Take  the  American  girl  child  —  " 

"A  vast  subject,"  commented  the  Professor. 

"  The  American  girl  child  is  getting  a  good  deal 
of  sugar  —  figuratively.  The  question  comes,  Is 
it  good  for  her?  Is  her  freedom,  her  undomestic 
training,  her  intellectual  development,  to  the  ad- 
vantage of  the  race  ?  I  believe  with  Mr.  Ruskin 
that  you  can't  make  a  girl  lovely  unless  you  make 
her  happy.  But  how  can  we  expect  her  to 
know  what  will  make  her  happy  ?  Are  n't  you 
afraid,  Professor,  that  she  is  becoming  a  trifle 
frivolous  ?  Of  course  you  yourself  are  a  living 
contradiction  —  " 

"  Don't  try  to  deceive  me,"  warned  the  Professor. 
"  I  perceive  in  what  you  say,  not  the  doubts  of  an 
incipient  cynic,  but  the  remorse  of  a  doting  and  in- 
dulgent man.  Most  really  typical  American  men 
are  in  the  same  situation.  They  are  wondering  if 
they  haven't  overdone  it,  and,  being  too  busy  to 
find  out  for  themselves,  are  eager  for  outside  judg- 
ment, upon  which  they  may  act,  de  jure.    The  vice 

31 


Miss  America 


of  the  American  man  is  his  indulgence  of  the 
American  girl.  The  foreigner  commiseratingly 
thinks  that  the  American  girl  demands  this  indul- 
gence. The  American  man  in  his  secret  soul  knows 
that  he  has  pampered  her  for  his  own  pleasure, 
and  because,  to  a  busy  man,  pampering  is  easier 
than  regulating." 

"  Yes,"  I  complained,  "  in  the  new  paradise 
Adam  is  always  to  blame." 

"  No,"  protested  the  Professor,  "  not  always ; 
just  humanly  often.  And  don't  think  that  you 
have  invented  this  modern  anxiety  for  the  welfare 
of  girl  children.  Before  and  since  '  L' Education  des 
Filles,'  they  all  have  been  '  harping  on  my  daughter.' 
Women  have  been  even  more  despairing  than  men. 
Hannah  More  thought  that  '  the  education  of  the 
present  race  of  females '  was  '  not  very  favorable  to 
domestic  happiness.'  Mrs.  Stowe  thought  '  the 
race  of  strong,  hearty,  graceful  girls  '  was  daily  de- 
creasing, and  that  in  its  stead  was  coming  '  the 
fragile,  easily  fatigued,  languid  girls  of  the  modern 
age,  drilled  in  book  learning  and  ignorant  in 
common  things.'  Now  that  sort  of  thing  has  been 
going  on  since  our  race  stopped  speaking  with  the 
arboreal  branch  of  the  family.  There  is  perpetual 
opportunity  for  a  treatise  on  '  The  Antiquity  of 
New  Traits.'  We  are  apt  to  think  that  we  of  this 
era  have  invented  the  idea  of  educating  girls,  but 
civilized  children  always  have  been  educated  early 
in  something.  Nowadays  it  is  in  science.  In  our 
colonial  days  it  was  in  piety.     Miss  Repplier,  who 

32 


The  Twig 


has  a  most  relishable  antipathy  for  prigs,  in  fiction 
and  in  life,  reminds  us  of  Cotton  Mather's  son,  who 
'  made  a  most  edifying  end  in  praise  and  prayer  at 
the  age  of  two  years  and  seven  months,'  and  of 
Phoebe  Bartlett,  who  was  '  ostentatiously  converted 
at  four.'  You  are  not  sorry  to  be  rid  of  all  that, 
are  you  ?  " 

"  No,"  I  assented,  "  most  assuredly  I  am  not.  It 
is  pretty  hard  to  find  the  Juvenile  Prig  on  this  soil 
nowadays  outside  of  the  most  inhuman  '  books  for 
the  young.'  And  we  all  are  glad  of  it.  You  may 
remember  the  passage  in  the  Chesterfield  letters  in 
which  the  father  writes  to  the  son:  '  To-morrow,  if 
I  am  not  mistaken,  you  will  attain  your  ninth  year; 
so  that  for  the  future  I  shall  treat  you  as  a  youth. 
You  must  now  commence  a  different  course  of  life, 
a  different  course  of  studies.  No  more  levity ; 
childish  toys  and  playthings  must  be  thrown  aside, 
and  your  mind  directed  to  serious  objects.  What 
was  not  unbecoming  of  a  child  would  be  disgraceful 
of  a  youth.'  We  certainly  have  outgrown  that 
view  of  things,  and  the  American  youngster  comes 
nearer  being  without  hypocrisy  than  any  product  of 
civilization  that  I  ever  have  studied.  But  what 
have  we  in  place  of  the  piety  and  affectation? 
What  is  the  working  result  of  so  much  indepen- 
dence ?  Are  not  the  American  girl  children,  as 
well  as  the  boys,  a  trifle  irreverent  ?  " 

"  Yes,  I  know,"  admitted  the  Professor,  "  the 
American  child  often  seems  a  shade  too  unawed. 
Balzac  says  somewhere  that  modesty  is  a  relative 

35 


Miss  America 

virtue  —  there  is  '  that  of  twenty  years,  that  of  thirty 
years,  and  that  of  forty  years.'  Our  ancestors  be- 
lieved in  a  severe,  hypocritical  modesty  for  the 
young,  trusting  that  they  would  get  over  it.  They 
did  worse  than  that  when  they  asked  youth  to 
anticipate  the  hypocrisies  of  age.    The  same  elegant 

person  whom  you 
have  just  quoted 
once  wrote  to  that 
same  son:  'Having 
mentioned  laugh- 
ing, I  want  most 
particularly  to  warn 
you  against  it ;  and 
I  could  heartily  wish 
that  you  may  often 
be  seen  to  smile, 
but  never  heard  to 
laugh  while  you 
live.'  Although 
Chesterfield  insisted 
that  he  was  '  neither 
of  a  melancholy  or 
cynical  disposition,' 
he  was  proud  to  be  able  to  say  to  his  boy  '  Since  I 
have  had  the  full  use  of  my  reason,  nobody  has 
ever  heard  me  laugh.'  The  next  time  you  feel 
inclined  to  say  mean  things  about  the  Puritans 
remember  that  declaration  by  the  Earl.  Now,  the 
American  seems  to  me  not  only  to  look  at  children 
differently,  but  to  look  at  life  differently,  and  any 

36 


The  Twig 


new  traits  in  the  American  child  probably  represent 
one  fact  as  much  as  the  other.    The  American  idea 

—  I  say  idea,  but  I  mean  the  American  habit ;  we 
explain  our  habits  and  call  the  explanation  a  theory 

—  merely  obliterates  age  discriminations.  The 
American  child  is  simply  the  diminutive  American. 
The  American  girl  is  her  mother  writ  small.  I 
don't  think  that 
she  is  a  whit  more 
independent  or 
irreverent  than 
her  mother." 

"  You  don't 
mean  to  say,  Pro- 
fessor, that  a  child 
should  not,  for 
instance,be  taught 
to  keep  a  proper 
silence  in  com- 
pany." 

"  Not  an  abso- 
lute silence.  A 
child  either  has  a 
right  to  be  in  a  company  or  it  has  not.  If  it  is  in  the 
company  it  has  a  right  to  be  articulate  like  the  other 
members  of  the  company.  If  it  is  a  sensible  child 
it  will  listen  to  its  elders,  not  because  they  are  its 
elders  but  because  they  are  its  betters,  because  they 
know  more,  are  more  competent  to  speak.  If  it  is 
not  sensible  it  will  be  made  to  suffer  for  its  foolish- 
ness, just  as  older  members  of  the  company  are 

37 


Miss  America 


made  to  suffer.  From  my  observation,  children 
naturally  brought  up  take  their  reasonable  place 
very  naturally  in  company." 

"  My  fear  is,  Professor,  that  your  naturalistic 
method  overlooks  much  of  what  we  have  become 
accustomed  to  think  when  we  speak  of  'breeding.' 
Now,  children,  even  American  children,  do  not 
acquire  this  instinctively.  Breeding  includes  re- 
straint, externally  applied  restraint — I  don't  mean 
applied  with  a  slipper  or  a  rattan,  though  restraint 
to  have  a  really  fine  catholicity  should,  in  my 
opinion,  include  these  symbols  —  but  restraint 
inculcated  by  a  wise,  or  at  least  a  wiser,  authority. 
I  believe  sincerely  that  we  have,  in  the  past, 
tried  to  bend  the  twig  too  far.  But  the  bene- 
ficial results  of  guiding  twigs  has  been,  I  think, 
indisputably  proved.  Taking  away  too  many 
guides  and  supports  must  have  its  dangers.  I 
think  of  these  things  when  I  see  the  unhampered 
American  girl  of  to-day.  She  is  a  lovely  spectacle. 
Yet  I  sometimes  wonder,  in  a  trite  and  old-fash- 
ioned way,  if  her  sort  of  training  or  absence  of 
training  is  going  to  make  her  a  woman  who  will 
know  how  to  manage  a  household  and  children. 
I  can  see  clearly  enough  that  she  is  going  to 
know  how  to  manage  a  husband  ;  but  the  house 
—  and  the  children  —  " 

The  Professor  was  musing.  "  Your  anxiety  makes 
me  think  of  the  early  criticisms  of  the  kindergarten. 
'  What !  '  they  used  to  exclaim,  '  a  mob  of  unman- 
ageable brats  and  no  ferule  ? '    Yet  it  is  so.  Your 

38 


The  Twig 


misgivings  overlook,  I  think,  the  latitudes  of  train- 
ing, the  obligations  of  breeding.  The  American 
seems  to  me  to  be  guiding  his  children  as  he  guides 
his  civic  affairs,  not  by  brute  force  but  by  giving 
and  taking.  If  his  child  is  born  with  the  right 
to  the  pursuit  of  happiness,  he  believes  in  start- 
ing the  pursuit  early.  I  suppose  that  children 
in  the  United  States  have  greater  liberty  than 
children  in  any  other  country.  The  conferring  of 
liberty  has  its  dangers,  and  those  who  confer  it 
cannot  expect  to  escape  the  obligations  that  go 
with  the  gift.  It  has  cost  the  American  some 
annoyance  to  confer  liberty  and  privileges  on 
grown-up  folks  from  various  quarters.  If  he 
decides  —  and  he  does  so  quite  reasonably  I  think 
—  to  include  his  children,  he  is  bound  to  stand 
with  the  emancipated." 

"  Professor,"  I  said,  "  your  words  are  soothing. 
They  are  alluringly  optimistic.  I  don't  want  to  re- 
form the  American  child.  I  like  him  —  and  espe- 
cially her  —  as  at  present  conditioned.  I  believe 
that  the  irreverence  is  largely  a  seeming  irrever- 
ence—  an  irreverence  toward  traditions  rather  than 
toward  people  and  principles  ;  which  simply  is  say- 
ing what  we  should  say  of  grown-up  Americans. 
And  I  believe  that  in  any  case  the  boy  will  knock 
his  way  out  somehow.  But  the  girl  —  I  am  not 
doubting  her;  I  am  not  believing  that  she  is  so 
petted  a  darling  as  Paul  Bourget,  for  instance,  seems 
to  think  she  is.  I  am  not  questioning  the  intrinsic 
charm  of  her  style,  the  piquing  prophecies  of  her 

39 


Miss  America 


mind,  the  perfection  of  her  beauty,  the  delight  of 
her  companionship  ;  I  am  wondering  whether  this 
immediately  agreeable  sort  of  product  is  going  to 
meet  the  requirements  of  life  as  it  is  opening  up  to 
us  in  this  land,  if — " 

"  Well,"  swung  in  the  Professor,  "  if  you  were 
going  to  have  a  worry,  it  is  a  pity  you  could  n't 
have  had  a  new  one  —  the  new  ones  keep  us  busy 
enough.  You  are  very  trite  this  time.  You  sound 
like  a  reformer — " 

"  Heaven  forbid  !  "  I  cried. 

"  —  and  a  reformer  nowadays  has  a  passion  for 
beginning  on  the  children.  Please  don't.  Some  of 
these  reforming  women  remind  me  of  the  advertise- 
ment in  the  London  paper :  '  Bulldog  for  sale. 
Will  eat  anything.  Very  fond  of  children.'  These 
reforming  women  will  reform  anything  —  and  they 
are  very  fond  of  children." 

"It  is  particularly  the  American  girl,"  I  went  on, 
"who  is  illustrating  the  modern  yearning  to  skip 
intervals,  to  ignore  the  ordinary  processes  of  time. 
She  is  like  Horace  Walpole,  who  found  that  the 
deliberation  with  which  trees  grow  was  'extremely 
inconvenient  to  his  natural  impatience.'  It  doesn't 
seem  to  make  any  difference  how  rigidly  her  '  com- 
ing out'  time  is  fixed,  she  is  getting  to  be  a  woman 
before  her  time.  Mark  me,  Professor,  she  knows 
too  much,  she  —  " 

"  A  strictly  masculine  anxiety,  sir." 

"  —  she  knows  too  much,  to  the  exclusion  of 
some  other  things  she  does  n't  know." 

40 


The  Twig 


"  Now  don 7  mention  the  kitchen,"  cried  the  Pro- 
fessor, "  I  am  dreadfully  tired  of  that." 

"  No,  Professor,  her  general  cleverness  always 
seems  to  me  to  make  the  kitchen  anxiety  needless 
to  a  great  extent.  I  mean  that  in  knowing  so  much 
and  assuming  so  much  the  American  girl  child  may 
be  missing  some  of  that  sweetness  that  for  her  lies 
in  a  more  old-fashioned  girlhood.  As  a  kind  of 
unbent  twig  she  is  losing  some  of  the  more  depend- 
ent happiness  belonging  to  her  and  not  grudged  to 
her.  Mind  you,  Professor,  if  a  crime  has  been 
committed,  I  am  accessory — " 

"  I  began  with  that  assumption,"  remarked  the 
Professor. 

" —  and  I  am  hoping  that  there  has  been  no 
crime,  that  the  unbent  twig  is  growing  all  right  on 
its  own  account,  that  our  spoiled  daughters,  weary 
of  privilege,  may  be  longing  to  serve,  that  if  her 
modesty  is  not  expressed  in  meek  eyes  '  full  of 
wonder,'  her  lofty  glance  is  not,  Hermes-like,  given 
to  lying.  Whatever  the  future  may  have  in  store, 
she  at  least  is  what  she  seems  to  be.  Her  senti- 
ments may  sometimes  be  irreverent,  but  they  are 
her  own.  Perhaps  the  reason  she  seems  more  of 
an  individual  than  the  archetypal  girl  is,  as  you 
have  suggested,  that  we  have  stripped  her  of  the 
hypocrisy  by  which  she  pretended  not  to  be  a  unit 
but  only  the  mute  shadow  of  a  unit." 

"  O,  you  will  come  around  !  "  chuckled  the  Pro- 
fessor. 

43 


Miss  America 


"  '  Come  around,'  Professor  ?  You  mean  sink, 
back  into  the  Slough  of  Idolatry.  I  feel  it  in  my 
bones  that  in  spite  of  a  gleam  of  intelligent  interro- 
gation as  to  the  wisdom  of  pampering  the  American 
girl,  I  am  going  to  keep  right  on  —  " 

"You  mean,  if  you  will  be  honest,"  blurted  the 
Professor,  "  that  you  will  keep  on  letting  her  alone 
as  you  do  the  boy  child.  That  is  all.  Own  up. 
The  most  that  you  have  done  is  cease  the  special 
repression  of  the  girl.  For  better  or  for  worse  the 
American  has  done  simply  that :  forget  sex  in  rear- 
ing his  young." 


"  Ah,  Professor  !  when  we  forget  sex  are  we  not 
in  danger  of  a  costly  transgression  ?  Are  we  not 
combating  nature  ?  " 

"  On  the  contrary,  my  friend,  you  are  ceasing  to 
combat  nature.  There  is  nothing  nature  is  more 
definitely  certain  to  do  than  to  look  out  for  sex  on 
her  own  account.    Is  not  all  of  creation  trying  to 

44 


The  Twig 


teach  us  this  lesson  ?  Is  not  all  of  creation  trying 
to  teach  us  the  folly  and  the  futility  of  meddling  ? 
Let  nature  alone.  She  knows  her  business.  Sex 
duality  is  universal.  No  amount  of  sitting  up 
nights  will  help  you  to  think  out  a  way  of  success- 
fully interfering." 

I  looked  at  the  Professor.  She  is  very  much  a 
woman.  She  suggested  a  type  that  had  been  "  let 
alone."  She  is  not  a  freak.  Both  her  body  and 
her  mind  are  well  dressed,  and  she  is  good  to  look 
upon.  To  look  upon  her  sometimes  fills  me 
with  a  certain  misgiving.  But  it  is  not  a  misgiving 
for  her. 

"  And  yet,"  it  came  to  me  to  say,  though  not 
precisely  in  rebuke,  "  there  is  such  a  thing  as 
human  humility." 

"  Humility  ?  "  The  Professor  looked  over  at 
me  with  affected  scorn.  "  Then  illustrate  it,  please. 
I  cannot  see  the  humility  of  interference.  The 
American  does  not  repress  his 
daughter.  You  admit  that  you 
like  the  result.  Why  wrinkle 
your  brow  in  contemplation  of 
the  future  ?  Why  not  believe 
that  what  seems  to  be  true  is 
true,  that  the  American  girl 
flourishes  agreeably  in  her  free- 
dom ?  Give  her  the  natural 
privileges  bestowed  elsewhere 
throughout  creation.     Let  her 

45 


Miss  America 


grow.  She  is  not  like  Jupiter,  without  seasons. 
And  you  must  take  one  of  her  seasons  at  a 
time." 

"Professor,"  I  said  solemnly,  "you  remember 
Artemis  ?  " 

"  Yes,"  she  returned  with  equal  solemnity,  "  and 
I  remember  the  daughters  of  Pandareas." 


46 


Ill 


A  CENTURY'S  RUN 


w 


E  are  a  very  young 
nation,  yet  we  have 
a  past.  In  popular  accep- 
tance we  have  little  to  live 
down,  which  should  be  a 
comfort.  Just  at  present 
there  is  a  tendency  to  be  dis- 
respectful toward  the  past,  to 
smile  at  ancestral  pretension, 
to  humanize  the  Fathers  of 
the  Republic,  to  sneer  at  the 
straw  and  bones  on  the  floor 
of  King  Arthur's  dining 
hall,  to  uncover  the  littleness  of  the  ancient  giants, 
to  question  the  beauty  of  the  ancient  heroines. 
Probably  this  needed  to  be  done,  particularly 
in  defence  of  the  abused  Present,  which  always 
hitherto  has  had  a  hard  time  of  it.  "  Every 
age  since  the  golden,"  says  George  Eliot,  "  may  be 
made  more  or  less  prosaic  by  minds  that  attend  only 
to  the  vulgar  and  sordid  elements,  of  which  there 

47 


Miss  America 


are  always  an  abundance,  even  in  Greece  and  Italy, 
the  favorite  realms  of  the  respective  optimists." 
The  author  of  "  Romola  "  was  willing  not  to  have 
lived  sooner,  and  to  possess  even  Athenian  life 
"solely  as  an  inodorous  fragment  of  antiquity." 

But  even  the  past,  sinfully  boastful  and  compla- 
cent as  it  appears,  has  rights  which  we  must  make 
some  show  of  respecting,  and  we  need  not  too 
effusively  applaud  the  present.  Possibly  the  one 
good  excuse  for  finding  out  and  confessing  the 
whole  truth  about  the  past,  is  the  need  to  show,  at 
whatever  cost,  that  neither  all  of  our  vices  nor  all  of 
our  virtues  are  entirely  new.  The  passion  for  dis- 
covery is  so  strong  that  some  one  always  is  ready 
to  prove  that  the  most  trite  and  fundamental  of 
traits  are  absolutely  novel,  and  the  same  passion 
appears  in  the  unction  with  which  the  pretension  is 
ridiculed  and  overthrown.  I  talked  one  day  with  a 
distinguished  American  historian,  who  confessed 
that  the  supreme  difficulty  for  the  commentator  on 
human  character  and  events  was  that  arising  from 
a  tendency  to  "  think  disproportionately  well  of 
facts  which  he  himself  has  discovered."  Admit  this 
to  be  a  human  trait  and  we  have  a  sufficient  ex- 
planation of  the  ardor  of  the  discoverer. 

Now,  no  man  can  regard  as  insignificant  any 
fact  concerning  woman,  disproportionate  as  the  im- 
portance of  the  fact  may  be  made  to  appear  in 
comparison  with  other  facts  concerning  her,  so  that 
we  have  no  greater  difficulty  in  appreciating  the 
noisy  announcement  of  the  New  Woman  than  in 

48 


A  Century's  Run 


appreciating  the  only  less  audible  contention  that 
there  is  no  such  appearance.  Happily  the  foolish 
discussion  is  over.  Only  a  few  catch-words  now 
remind  us  of  the  hopeless  debate.  Of  course,  Eve 
was  the  only  new  woman.  She  alone  was  incon- 
trovertibly  new  ;  and  to  seek  by  trick  of  title  to 
invest  with  newness  any  woman  who  came  after 
her,  was  a  frivolous  and  degenerate  conspiracy. 
Not,  indeed,  that  newness  is  intrinsically  a  defect, 
though  heraldry  and  afternoon  teas  may  be  arranged 
upon  that  assumption  ;  but  in  effect  it  is  belittling, 
destructive  of  certain  benefits  of  the  doubt,  insulting 
to  the  woman  of  the  past  and  skeptical  as  to  the 
woman  of  the  present. 

However,  our  national  past  and  our  national 
present  are  so  full  of  superficial  and  even  of  funda- 
mental contrasts,  that  if  ever  a  merciful  sentence  is 
to  be  passed  upon  one  who,  peering  through  the 
"turbid  media"  of  sociological  analysis,  mistakes 
the  Zeitgeist  for  a  new  woman,  it  is  in  our  own 
longitudes.  Like  a  child  growing  up  under  the 
eye  of  an  arrogant  and  pompous  parent,  we  have, 
nationally,  been  made  to  feel  from  the  beginning 
that  we  are  new,  even  tentative,  that  we  are  un- 
classified, all  but  vagrant  in  the  ethnological  sense. 
It  is  possible  that  recent  events  will  modify  in  cer- 
tain important  ways,  external  contemplation  of  us 
as  a  nation,  that,  in  spite  of  certain  new  effects 
which  we  may  be  accused  of  producing,  a  conscious- 
ness and  a  recognition  of  our  definite  maturity  may 
have  some  responsive  effect  in  ourselves. 
4  49 


Miss  America 


Meanwhile  it  is  pleasantly  easy  to  detect  many 
interesting  changes  in  the  situation  of  the  American 
girl  within  the  span  of  the  century.  Whether  she 
merely  illustrates  the  social  and  political  changes 
which  have  taken  place,  or,  as  we  so  often  have 
been  urged  to  believe,  actually  indicates  why  they 
have  taken  place,  she  presents  a  spectacle  of  pecu- 
liar interest,  a  spectacle  which  has  so  successfully 
piqued  the  analytical  spirit  of  the  period  that  it 
would  be  expounding  the  commonplace  to  do  more 
than  quickly  sketch  a  few  of  the  outlines. 

We  have  seen  her  bidding  good-bye  to  the  school- 
ma'am  at  a  time  when  any  education  was  good 
enough  for  a  girl,  —  good  enough  not  only  because 
neither  the  kitchen  nor  the  drawing-room  exacted 
Greek,  but  because  heavier  pabulum  would  utterly 
ruin  her  mental  digestion ;  and  we  have  seen  her  at 
a  later  time  when  no  education  is  too  good  for  her, 
bidding  good-bye  to  an  army  of  instructors  at  com- 
mencement time,  radiant  in  her  cap  and  gown,  the 
class  song  ringing  pleasantly  in  her  ears,  the  breath 
of  June  in  her  life,  with  a  crisp  diploma  to  symbolize 
her  triumphs.  In  fact,  we  have  seen  the  morality 
of  educating  her  dismissed  as  a  settled  question,  and 
the  matter  of  the  quantity  and  quality  left  to  the 
perhaps  not  easy  but  at  least  final  arbitrament  of 
her  individual  capacity. 

We  have  seen  her  yield  up  to  strenuous  and  in- 
ventive man,  one  by  one,  various  and  many  offices 
once  regarded  as  essentially  domestic,  and  even  as 
bounding  that  debatable  domain,  her  "sphere"; 

5° 


A  Century's  Run 


we  have  seen  the  spinning  wheel  go  into  the  garret 
and  come  down  again  years  later,  pertly  polished, 
with  pink  ribbons  on  the  distaff  and  spindle ; 
we  have  seen  the  superseded  milkmaid  gathering 
bottled  cream  at  the  basement  door,  the  super- 
seded seamstress 
wearing  a  man-made 
jacket;  and  all  with- 
out audible  murmur 
at  the  displacement. 

We  have  seen  the 
trained  nurse  succeed 
Sairy  Gamp,  many 
nostrums  disappear- 
ing gratefully  in  the 
transformation,  and 
have  found  in  the  new 
sisterhood  of  bedside 
saints  a  cheering  sign 
of  a  finer  civilization, 
a  prophecy  of  the 
future  of  medicine. 
We  have  seen  the 
amanuensis  penning 
"Paradise  Lost"  and  law  briefs  and  grave  history 
and  exhausting  letters  —  the  amanuensis  celebrated 
in  sentimental  fiction  and  unsentimental  commerce, 
fulfil  the  promise  of  her  own  invaluable  service  in 
the  modern  typewriter,  whose  little  white  fingers 
help  move  the  lever  of  the  great  mercantile  machine, 
without  whom  modern  trade  could  scarcely  stir,  and 

53 


Miss  America 


whose  taking  away  would  rob  all  business  life  of 
an  inestimably  sweetening  influence. 

We  have  seen  her  needle  placed  in  the  jaws  of  a 
machine,  and  have  seen  her  yoked  with  men  in  ser- 
vice to  this  iron  master.  We  have  seen  her  leave 
the  fireside  armchair  to  climb  the  tall  stool  of  the 
counting-room  and  the  railway  station.  We  have 
seen  the  bodkin  displaced  by  the  scalpel,  the  lace 
cap  by  the  mortar-board,  the  apron  by  the  vestment. 
We  have  seen  her  emerge  from  the  shadows  of  the 
sanctuary  to  speak  in  the  councils  of  the  elders,  we 
have  seen  her  hurry  the  breakfast  dishes  to  go  and 
vote. 

We  have  seen  her,  once  content  to  be  the  theme 
of  art,  become  a  master  of  every  medium,  even  of 
architecture,  and  throwing  aside  at  last,  and  without 
petulance,  the  insulting  tributes  that  come  under  a 
sex  label.  We  have  seen  her,  once  forbidden  to 
read  newspapers,  successful  in  making  them  ;  com- 
mitting errors,  but  under  bad  counsel  and  direction 
rather  than  by  any  failure  of  her  own  taste,  and  win- 
ning highest  honors  in  journalistic  art  and  conflict. 

The  philosophy  of  all  these  changes  naturally  is 
complex  and  difficult.  It  is  a  truism  to  remark 
that  the  danger  always  is  of  assuming  that  they 
mean  more  than  they  do.  We  perhaps  instinctively 
measure  a  change  by  the  mere  picturesqueness  of 
the  contrast.  We  require  to  be  reminded  much 
that  humanity  changes  very  little  from  century  to 
century,  that  whatever  the  appearances,  great  revo- 
lutions in  human  sentiment  and  motive  probably 

54 


A  Century's  Run 


have  not  happened.  No  student  of  human  nature 
comes  oftener  upon  any  discovery  than  upon  that 
of  the  simple  persistence  in  the  twilight  of  the  cen- 
tury of  the  old  human  instincts  that  prevailed  at  the 
dawn.  So  that  we  need  not  think  to  find  in  all 
these  new  clothes  any  greatly  different  people. 
When  the  century's  clock  strikes  the  hundredth 
year,  and  Father  Time,  acting  as  master  of  ceremo- 
nies, shouts  "  Masks  off! "  there,  among  all  the 
masqueraders,  are  the  same  faces  that  have  grown 
familiar  in  the  every-day  of  life. 

If  the  reader  detects  in  this  attitude  any  wish  to 
escape  the  burdens  of  an  explanation,  an  anxiety  to 
dodge  the  awful  Why  ?  in  all  these  outward  modifi- 
cations of  Miss  America,  he,  and  especially  she,  is 
quite  at  liberty  to  do  so,  for,  as  I  perhaps  have 
indicated,  and  must  repeat  defensively  from  time  to 
time,  definitely  to  explain  Miss  America  is  farthest 
from  my  thoughts  ;  though  I  cannot  deny  an  inten- 
tion, which  doubtless  appeared  at  an  early  stage,  to 
express  respectfully  certain  untested,  and,  it  may 
be,  actually  impulsive,  personal  opinions  regarding 
her.  To  refrain  from  exercising  such  a  privilege 
under  circumstances  which  forbid  interruption  would 
be  superhuman. 

More  interesting  to  me  at  the  moment  are  some 
appearances  already  fairly  familiar,  yet  new  in 
garb  and  situation.  The  young  woman  in  new 
lights  and  new  places  has  a  natural  fascination.  I 
realized  this  vividly  one  day  in  the  hotel  of  a 
Western  city,  when   I  became  conscious  that  an 

59 


Miss  America 


unusual  guest  had  arrived.  She  was  a  sturdy 
young  woman,  yet  delicate  of  feature,  with  a  mild, 
undismayed  blue  eye.  She  came  swinging  into  the 
hotel,  a  darkey  lad  at  her  russet  shoe  heels  with  a 
telescope  bag.  She  herself  carried  a  sleek  yellow 
satchel  which  she  placed  in  front  of  the  desk.  She 
wrote  her  name  in  a  firm,  small  hand,  took  a  heap 
of  letters  handed  to  her  by  the  clerk,  and  dropped 
into  a  near-by  chair  to  open  several  of  them  with  a 
quick  flip  of  her  gloved  finger.  In  no  way  was  she 
radically  dressed.  Her  tailor-made  suit  was  of  a 
fine  cloth,  richly  trimmed.  Her  clothes,  like  her 
manner,  had  not  an  unnecessary  touch.  Later,  I 
saw  her  interviewing  the  porter,  who  presently  was 
rolling  three  large  sample  trunks  into  one  of  those 
first  floor  rooms  provided  by  certain  hotels  for  the 
use  of  drummers,  whose  goods  for  display  cannot 
well  be  taken  upstairs.  I  saw  her  come  in  at  dif- 
ferent times  with  three  different  shopkeepers,  and 
others  came,  evidently  by  appointment,  to  inspect 
many  rolls  of  carpet  which  soon  littered  the  display 
room. 

"  She 's  a  trump  !  "  muttered  the  clerk,  with  an 
admiring  glance  across  the  corridor ;  "  the  best 
drummer  Warp  &  Woof  ever  had.  She  succeeded 
one  of  their  New  York  men,  and  she  beat  his  orders 
by  forty  thousand  dollars  the  first  year.  And  there 's 
no  fooling  about  her  either.  She  does  n't  try  to 
mesmerize  the  customers,  though  she 's  pretty 
enough  to  do  that  if  she  cared  to.  She  simply 
makes  them  want  the  goods,  and  she  sells  so  square 

60 


A  Century's  Run 


that  she  doesn't  have  any  trouble  coming  back  to 
the  same  people." 

"  Is  she  a  single  woman?  "  I  asked.  Something 
in  this  inquiry  amused  the  clerk.  Then  he  said  : 
"  Well,  they  say  she 's  engaged  to  a  drummer  for 
Felt,  Feathers  &  Co.,  and  that  if  they  ever  manage 
to  get  into  Chicago  at  the  same  time  they  will  get 
married." 

One  day  in  mid-Missouri  a  lean,  brown,  bare- 
footed boy  was  driving  me  across  country  to  a  rail- 
way station.  Suddenly  the  boy  said:  "We  ain't 
goin'  t'  have  no  dog  show." 

"  No  ?  "  The  boy  shook  his  head.  Presently  he 
added  :    "  And  that  girl 's  dead  sore  on  this  town." 

"  What  girl  ?  "  I  demanded. 

The  boy  turned  to  me  with  a  look  of  incredulity. 
"  Did  n't  you  see  'er?  " 

"  You  don't  mean  that  girl  in  the  blue  dress  that 
was  at  the  hotel  breakfast  this  morning  ?  " 

"  That 's  her,  yes." 

I  remembered  that  she  had  very  dark  eyes,  and 
no  color;  that  she  wore  an  Alpine  hat  and  a  neat 
gown,  that  she  looked  straight  before  her  with  an 
almost  sullen  expression  when  she  spoke  to  the 
waiter. 

"  I  drove  her  over  to  Bimley's,"  the  boy  said, 
"  and  she  sat  there  where  you  are  for  two  miles 
without  saying  a  word.  Then  she  turned  at  me 
quick  and  says,  '  Have  you  got  a  cigarette  ? '  and  I 
said  yes  I  had,  just  one.  Then  she  said,  '  Have 
yer  got  a  match  ? '  and  I  give  her  that,  and  she 
S  65 


Miss  America 


smoked  for  a  long  time  without  sayin'  anything. 
After  a  while  she  let  out  and  said  this  was  the 
meanest,  low-down  town  she  ever  struck,  that  they 
was  meaner 'n  dirt  here,  especially  the  college,  and 
that  she  never  wanted  t'  see  it  n'r  hear  of  it  agin. 
Yer  see,  she  goes  from  one  town  to  another  and 
gits  up  dog  shows  for  the  people  that  have  fine 
dogs,  and  they  have  the  town  band,  an'  lemonade 
an'  cake  an'  prizes.  Anyway,  she  had  a  hard  time 
stirrin'  them  up  here;  but  she  could  have  got 
through  all  right  only  for  the  president  of  the  col- 
lege. He  said  he  would  n't  let  the  girls  go,  and 
that  settled  it.  They  gave  it  up  after  this  girl 'd 
blown  in  a  two  days'  bill  at  the  hotel,  and  she  got 
mad  and  lit  out.  Well,  she  quieted  down  agin 
before  we  got  to  Bimley's,  and  when  we  was  in  the 
hollow  by  Moresville  I  looked  at  her  and  she  was 
cryin  . 

One  other  glimpse  :  Miss  Linnett  was  the  type- 
writer at  Stoke  Brothers'.  At  first  she  had  been 
just  the  typewriter,  coming  highly  recommended 
from  the  typewriter  school.  She  appeared  at  the 
minute  of  nine  and  went  away  at  the  minute  of  five, 
unless  one  of  the  Stokes  stayed  beyond  that  hour, 
or  late  letters  and  the  copying  book  delayed  her. 
She  unvaryingly  dressed  in  black,  wore  her  brown 
hair  simply  in  a  knot,  and  in  the  depth  of  winter 
always  had  a  flower  of  some  sort  on  her  table.  The 
elder  Stoke  was  feeble,  and  his  eyesight  grew  to  be 
so  poor  that  she  read  his  letters  to  him.  The  junior 
Stoke  would  never  let  her  take  formal  dictation, 

66 


A  Century's  Run 


preferring  to  give  her  the  gist  of  what  he  wanted  to 
say  and  letting  her  put  it  in  her  own  way.  In  this 
habit  they  both  came  greatly  to  depend  upon  her. 
After  a  time,  too,  her  growing  knowledge  of  the 
business  induced  the  cashier  and  bookkeeper  to 
go  to  her  in  certain  contingencies,  and  she  acquired, 
without  either  seeking  or  rejecting  it,  various  discre- 
tionary powers  in  regard  to  the  machinery  of  the 
business.  If  anything  went  wrong  they  resorted 
to  Miss  Linnett.  If  old  Stoke  forgot  anything 
Miss  Linnett  was  a  second  memory  to  him.  If  the 
younger  Stoke  was  in  a  hurry  he  would  hand  over 
the  letters  to  Miss  Linnett  to  answer  as  she  saw  fit. 
She  knew  all  the  correspondents  of  the  house  and 
their  prejudices.  She  knew  the  combination  of  old 
Stoke's  private  safe  after  Stoke  himself  had  for- 
gotten it.  She  had  a  way  of  her  own  in  putting 
away  documents,  and  nobody  ever  thought  of 
studying  the  scheme.  She  met  all  of  these  obliga- 
tions with  a  dispassionate  serenity,  and  everything 
she  did  was  done  with  an  easy  and  amiable  quick- 
ness. She  became  the  brain  centre  of  the  office. 
She  was  Stoke  Brothers. 

Then  one  night  she  broke  down,  fainted,  there 
before  old  Stoke,  who  fell  on  his  knees  beside  her 
and  wept  in  real  anguish  while  the  little  white  book- 
keeper ran  for  a  doctor,  and  the  cashier  tremblingly 
fetched  water  to  sprinkle  her  face.  When  she  did 
not  come  the  next  day  at  nine  the  situation  in  the 
office  was  pitiful.  Old  Stoke  was  useless,  and  the 
younger  Stoke  shifted  his  letters  from  one  hand  to 

67 


Miss  America 


the  other  in  utter  misery.  The  bookkeeper  and 
cashier  fumbled  through  their  work  dazed  and  un- 
strung. In  the  days  of  doubt  that  followed  the 
situation  grew  more  gloomy.  There  was  great  ex- 
citement when  one  morning  she  came  down  town 
in  a  cab,  white  and  fluttering,  and,  leaning  on  the 
bookkeeper's  arm,  made  her  way  from  the  elevator 
to  the  office.  She  smiled  at  the  little  group,  ac- 
cepted the  homage  quietly,  insisted  on  showing 
them  where  certain  papers  were,  promised  them  that 
she  should  be  back  very  soon,  and  went  away  again, 
old  Stoke  patting  her  hand  and  telling  her  to  be 
careful.    At  the  end  of  the  month  she  died. 

"  What  did  they  ever  do  without  her?  "  I  asked 
when  I  had  heard  the  story. 

"  They  did  n't  do  without  her.  Stoke  Brothers 
went  out  of  business.  I  suppose  they  had  been 
thinking  of  doing  that;  they  were  pretty  well  on  in 
years  —  and  they  couldn't  get  on  without  Miss 
Linnett." 

Yes,  of  all  the  changes  that  have  marked  this 
changeful  century,  of  all  the  transformations,  social, 
political  and  economic,  that  have  affected  the  situa- 
tion of  women  since  the  establishment  of  the  Re- 
public, that  change  is  most  significant  and  potent 
which  has  placed  her  so  widely  and  so  potently  in 
business.  Miss  America  is  in  business  :  patiently 
ambitiously,  grotesquely,  indispensably  in  business. 
The  social  changes  have  not  been  great,  —  indeed, 
one  is  often  startled  to  find  how  slight  they  have  been. 

68 


A  Century's  Run 


Political  changes,  important  and  prophetic  as  they 
are,  have  not  as  yet  sensibly  affected  the  life  of 
women  in  general  ;  while  the  extraordinary  extent 
of  women's  entrance  into  business  in  co-operation 
with  and  competition  with  men,  has  had  an  un- 
exampled effect  upon  the  American  girl's  domes- 
tic, social  and 
political  situa- 
tion. 

The  American 
girl  is  not,  as  yet, 
very  definitely 
conscious  of  this 
effect,  although 
she  has  been  told 
about  it  often 
and  vehemently 
in  one  way  or 
another.  Unless 
she  is  writing  a 
paper  forher  club 
she  has  n't  time 
to  think  much 
about  it.  She 
enjoys  business  as  distinguished  from  plain  work. 
The  idea  of  a  business  training  rather  piques  the 
fancy  of  an  era  that  has  laughed  away  the  tradition 
of  a  "  sphere,"  and  the  sort  of  young  lady  who 
in  a  past  era  would  have  no  obligations  beyond 
needlework,  is  found  dabbling  in  shorthand  and 
bookkeeping,  as  the  princes  learn  a  trade. 

69 


Miss  America 


And  so  the  scientific  observer  is  greatly  dis- 
tressed at  times  by  the  thought  that  there  must 
be  a  mighty  readjustment  before  things  can  come 
out  smooth  again.    You  might    think   that  the 


whole  thing  had  come  upon  science  unawares, 
that  it  was,  in  the  phrase  of  a  young  woman  who 
was  not  new,  all  "too  rash,  too  unadvised,  too 
sudden."  But  no  sound  authority  exhibits  real 
worriment  on  this  point.  If  it  is  man  who  com- 
plains, it  is  man  who  refuses  to  get  along  without 

70 


A  Century's  Run 


her.  From  this  time  forth  business  is  going  to  be 
a  co-educational  affair.  We  shall  be  told  many 
times  again  that  somehow  all  this  will  detract  from 
woman's  charm,  and  whether  we  believe  or  mistrust 
so  much,  we  shall,  I  suspect,  go  on  taking  the  inter- 
esting risk. 

By  the  natural  processes  of  time,  women,  young 
and  old,  will,  I  suppose,  like  the  rest  of  creation, 
continue  to  become  better  off.  Doubtless  this  is 
optimism.  Pessimism  says  that  two  and  two  make 
three.  Sentimentalism  says  that  two  and  two  make 
five.  It  is  optimism  that  is  content,  and  with  good 
reason,  to  say  that  two  and  two  make  four. 

The  traveller  in  a  scurrying  railroad  train  be- 
comes familiar  with  few  more  thought-suggesting 
sights  than  the  farm  woman  in  the  cottage  door. 
She  comes  forward  with  her  hands  in  her  apron,  if 
not  with  a  baby  on  her  arm.  Sometimes  she  waves 
her  hand  to  the  unanswering  train.  Sometimes 
she  leans  against  the  door-post  and  looks,  one 
might  fiincy  wistfully,  at  the  clattering  cars,  at  the 
people  who  are  going  somewhere.  Sometimes  the 
doorway  is  in  a  cabin  with  one  room.  Sometimes 
the  woman  is  slatternly,  drooping;  sometimes  she 
has  the  glow  of  content.  The  spectator  in  the 
car  cannot  but  wonder  what  are  the  emotions  of 
the  spectator  in  the  doorway.  Doubtless  there 
is  both  envy  and  commiseration  on  each  side.  If 
the  spectator  in  the  cars  sometimes  pities  the 
woman  in  the  cabin  door  as  one  who  is  left  out 
and  left  behind,  the  spectator  in  the  cabin  door 

73 


Miss  America 


sometimes  pities  the  haste-hunted  spectator  who  is 
being  noisily  flung  about  in  the  great  loom  of  life. 

To  glance  backward  over  a  century  is  to  feel  that 
life  constantly  reiterates  this  situation.  We  all  of 
us  are  roughly  divided — very  roughly,  sometimes 
—  into  the  two  groups:  the  people  in  the  cars  and 
the  people  in  the  doorways.  The  look  of  things 
must  go  on  being  affected  by  the  point  of  view. 
There  is  a  view-point  aloof  from  either  situation, 
but  it  is  not  one  which  the  merely  human  sojourner 
ever  can  be  privileged  to  occupy. 


IV 


STITCHES  AND  LINKS 

"  T^\ID  it  ever  occur  to 
M^/  vou,"  demanded  the 
Professor,  "  how  few  people 
actually  do  fashionable 
things? — that  we  probably 
are  just  as  hyperbolical  in 
assuming  that  young  women 
once  amused  themselves 
with  embroidery  as  that  thev 
now  amuse  themselves  with 
golf?  " 

"  Stitches  and  links,"  I  pondered,  knowing  that 
the  Professor  did  not  expect  an  answer. 

"  What  proportion  of  folks  should  you  say 
actually  do  concentrate  their  functions  in  the  '  bar- 
baric swat '  ?  " 

I  lifted  my  head ;  and  she  went  on  : 

"  Yes,  I  know  that  there  always  must  be  a  fash- 
ionable, a  dominating  pastime,  and  I  have  no  dis- 
paragement of  golf  as  golf.  It  is  a  good  enough 
game  in  its  way.  I  am  bound  to  admit  this  after 
having  made  a  very  good  score  myself.  Moreover, 

75 


Miss  America 


it  is  Scottish,  which  is  a  guarantee  of  a  latent  pro- 
fundity. It  is  a  large  game,  and,  as  Sir  Walter  said 
of  eating  tarts,  is  '  no  inelegant  pleasure.'  I  have 
been  told  by  those  who  have  had  an  opportunity 
to  know,  that  it  calls  out  a  great  variety  of  qualities. 
That  may  be  said  of  many  other  things;  but  no 
matter.  My  suggestion  is  that  the  assumption  of 
prevalence  in  a  so-called  fashionable  thing  leaves 
something  unexplained,  something  that  may  be 
very  important,  a  philosophical  hiatus  —  " 

"  Professor,"  I  said,  "  have  you  never  stopped  to 
think  that  fashionable  fads  and  fads  that  are  not 
fashionable  are  potent  in  two  ways,  that  is  to  say, 
first  and  primarily,  in  participation,  and  second,  in 
contemplation  ?  There  is  less  golf  than  talk  about 
golf.  One  game  of  golf  may  be  repeated  any  day, 
for  example,  one  hundred  million  times  in  print. 
As  the  newspapers  play  golf  with  type,  so  the 
physically  present  spectators  on  the  links  are  re- 
peated many-fold  in  those  who  not  less  are  partici- 
pants and  spectators,  who  wear  ostentatious  golf 
stockings  without  ever  having  seen  a  teeing  ground. 
This  secondary  participation  and  appreciation  is  the 
breath  of  life  to  social  fads.  Probably  this  may  be 
said  of  all  not  absolutely  primary  pleasures.  And 
so  society  says,  '  We  are  all  playing  golf,'  which  is 
not  true  at  all,  but  which  instantly  produces  a  situa- 
tion that  amounts  to  the  same  thing.  We  shall 
say  that  one  woman  in  ten  thousand  who  may  be  in 
a  situation,  so  far  as  opportunity  is  concerned,  to 
play  anything,  is  playing  golf,  but  this  shall  not 

76 


Stitches  and  Links 


make  it  possible  for  the  other  nine  thousand  nine 
hundred  and  ninety-nine  who  are  not  playing  golf, 
to  play  anything  else  and  make  it  fashionable  at  the 
same  time.  This  could  not  be,  any  more  than  that 
we  could  have  more  than  one  Napoleon,  more  than 
one  most-talked-of  book,  more  than  one  absorbing 
scandal,  at  a  time.  All  epidemics  present  this 
feature  of  concentration.  Napoleon  was  just  as 
much  an  epidemic  as  crinoline  or  '  Robert  Elsmere.' 
The  hypnotists  have  a  word  for  this  which  has 
escaped  me  at  the  moment  —  " 

"  Multo-suggestion,"  contributed  the  Professor, 
patiently. 

"  Something  to  that  effect,  in  which  we  have 
a  scientific  explanation  of  the  exclusiveness  of 
fashion,  an  explanation  of  fashion  itself.  And  the 
thing  could  not  be  different.  That  susceptibility 
to  the  contagion  of  enthusiasm  which  inspires  the 
American  with  so  passionate  an  interest  in  all  of 
his  hobbies,  is  a  susceptibility  which  explains  his 


Miss  America 


keener  interest  in  life,  his  democracy  of  sentiment, 
his  ardent  yet  generally  cautious  and  sane  pursuit 
of  entertainment." 

"  Much  of  this,"  interposed  the  Professor,  in  her 
ruthless  way,  "  might,  it  seems  to  me,  be  said  with 
equal  propriety  of  any  civilized  people." 

"  I  think,  Professor,  that  there  are  some  signifi- 
cant points  of  difference  —  points  of  difference  asso- 
ciated very  largely,  I  think,  with  the  American 
sense  of  humor,  which  we  are  in  the  habit  of  com- 
placently arrogating.  I  think,  Professor,  that  your 
philosophical  hiatus  is  occupied  very  largely  by  a 
sense  of  humor." 

"  That,"  laughed  the  Professor,  "  reminds  me  of 
that  story  of  the  boy  who  was  seeking  to  explain 
to  his  companion  the  characteristics  of  spaghetti. 
'  You  know  maccaroni  ? '  '  Yes.'  '  And  you  know 
the  hole  through  it  ? '  '  Yes.'  '  Well,  spaghetti 's 
the  hole.'  I  do  wish  I  could  believe  more  com- 
pletely in  your  sense  of  humor  theory.  In  the 
first  place  it  is  hard  to  explain  some  of  the  things 
the  young  people  do  by  their  possession  of  a  sense 
of  humor." 

"  On  the  contrary,  Professor,  I  think  American 
young  folks  develop  a  sense  of  humor  earlier  than 
any  other  in  the  world,  which  is  a  Yankee  enough 
thing  to  say.  This  may  be  an  odd  contention 
from  me,  but  to  me  one  of  the  most  distinctive 
traits  of  the  American  girl  is  her  gift  for  being 
unserious.  It  is  not  always  a  sense  of  humor, 
either ;  if  it  is,  it  is  a  sense  entirely  her  own,  for  it 

78 


Stitches  and  Links 


certainly  is  not  associated  with  traits  which  we  ascribe 
to  a  sense  of  humor  in  men.  In  any  case  it  is  a 
saving  sense,  a  sense  that  keeps  her  from  taking 
things  so  tragically  as  the  unknowing  or  unsympa- 
thetic spectator  might  expect.  The  American  has 
a  genius  for  radicalism,  a  creative  defiance  of  logic 
and  tradition.  Once  in  a  while  some  philosopher 
discovers  that  the  frivolities  of  life  have  an  immense 
importance.  Scientifically  the  physical  distortions 
of  a  laugh  are  ridiculous.  Yet  we  almost  have 
ceased  to  defend  it,  even  in  young  ladies." 

"  A  ready  laugh,"  the  Professor  said,  "  is  no  in- 
dication of  a  sense  of  humor.  The  comic  and  the 
humorous  are  sometimes  even  antagonistic.  You 
have  heard  me  defend  irreverence  in  girls,  but  a 
want  of  seriousness  often  indicates  a  want  of  hu- 
mor, for  a  sense  of  humor,  my  friend,  is  essen- 
tially a  sense  of  proportion.  Now,  to  my  mind, 
the  American  girl  does  not  indicate  so  keen  a 
sense  of  proportion  in  her  golf,  for  instance,  as  in 
her  clubs." 

"  Well,"  I  ventured,  "  she  is  serious  enough  in 
them,  surely." 

"  Only  to  those  who  do  not  understand  her," 
returned  the  Professor  severely.  "  That  women 
take  their  clubs  too  seriously,  too  improvingly,  has 
been  a  matter  of  complaint  for  a  long  time.  There 
has  been  almost  a  missionary  spirit  among  those 
who  have  sought  to  save  our  girls  from  clubs. 
Some  of  the  missionaries  have  preached  total  ab- 
stinence among  the  girls.  '  If  you  take  one  club,' 
6  Si 


Miss  America 


they  have  said,  '  you  will  take  another.  The  appe- 
tite will  grow  on  you.  You  pride  yourself  on  your 
power  of  resistance  now ;  but  after  you  have  taken 
a  club,  a  dreadful,  unappeasable  craving  will  spring 
up  within  you,  and  you  will  want  more.  You  will 
not  be  able  to  pass  a  club  without  wanting  it. 
Even  after  you  have  yielded  to  a  morning,  after- 
noon, and  evening  indulgence,  you  will  find  a  temp- 
tation to  take  a  luncheon  club  too,  —  and  when 
you  take  them  with  your  meals  they  have  a  par- 
ticularly insidious  effect.  From  this  it  is  but  a  step 
to  a  Browning  bracer  at  nine  A.  M.  and  a  Schopen- 
hauer cocktail  just  before  dinner.  Take  no  clubs 
at  all  —  especially  the  subtle,  supposed-to-be-in- 
nocuous reading  club  —  '  " 

"  Look  not  upon  the  club  when  it  is  read,"  I 
murmured. 

—  for  these,'"  the  Professor  continued,  with 
her  inimitable  chuckle,  "  '  for  these  lead  surely  to 
more  deadly  stimulants.  Indeed,  these  are,  to  those 
who  truly  know  them,  more  deadly  than  many 
another  sort.'  Then  there  is  the  more  moder- 
ate school  of  missionaries  which  is  for  limiting  the 
number  of  clubs  to  so  many  a  week,  or  to  cutting 
them  down  gradually  on  the  theory  that  a  girl  who 
has  been  taking  clubs  right  along  cannot  stop  short 
without  peril  to  her  health.  By  dropping,  say,  one 
club  a  week  for  a  whole  season,  a  girl  may,  from 
a  repulsive  intellectual  sot  be  brought  back,  by  pa- 
tient nursing,  and  in  due  time,  to  decency  and  three 
clubs  a  week." 

82 


Stitches  and  Links 


"But,  Professor,"  I  said,  "they  must  believe  in 
clubs  as  a  medicine,  as  a  stimulant  in  the  case  of 
a  threatening  mental  chill  —  " 

"  Don't  be  frivolous,"  commanded  the  Professor; 
"  my  irony  was  incidental  to  the  statement  that 
all  of  this  talk  about  the  seriousness  of  women's 
clubs  is  based  on  a  misap- 
prehension. In  outward 
form  the  clubs  are  serious, 
and  the  theme,  their  osten- 
sible  raison  d'etre,  almost 
justifies  the  misapprehen- 
sion. When  you  see  a 
batch  of  women  setting  in 
upon  civil  government,  or 
mediaeval  pottery,  or  San- 
skrit, or  Homer's  hymn  to 
the  Dioscuri,  or  the  Heft- 
khan  of  Isfendiyar,  it  is, 
perhaps, instinctive  that  the 
uninformed  should  jump  to 
the  conclusion  that  these 
women  are  serious,  though 
a  moment's  thought  might  suggest  a  wiser  view. 
If  women  really  took  these  things  seriously  they 
would  not  survive.  The  truth  is  that  the  French 
Revolution,  and  the  Rig-Veda,  and  the  Ramayana 
are  all  very  amusing  if  you  know  how  to  go  at 
them.  If  the  physical  culture  classes  took  the 
exercises  as  seriously  as  the  teachers  I  am  sure 
the  members  would  all  break  down.     And  it  is 

83 


Miss  America 


the  same  way  with  the  study  of  cathedrals  or 
street-cleaning." 

I  reminded  the  Professor  of  the  lady  I  had  heard 
of,  who  wanted  to  know  at  the  club  whether  the 
Parliamentary  drill  then  organizing  was  anything 
like  the  Delsarte  movements,  and  of  the  other, 
who,  at  her  first  meeting,  being  appointed  a  teller, 
wanted  to  know  what  she  was  to  tell.  "  I  trust, 
Professor,  that  you  will  not  take  from  me  my 
simple,  unquestioning  faith  in  the  earnestness  of 
these  light-seeking  ladies." 

"  Those  instances,"  smiled  the  Professor,  "  il- 
lustrate the  first  phase.  You  must  not  be  mis- 
led by  them,  for  they  actually  are  confirmatory. 
You  may  discern  in  them  the  attitude  of  mind 
favorable  to  the  feminine  way  of  taking  things 
lightly.  A  woman  who  asks  why,  never  gets  ner- 
vous prostration.  It  is  when  she  gets  above  ask- 
ing why  that  you  may  watch  for  shipwreck." 

"  Well,  Professor,  all  I  can  say  is  that  you  have 
left  me  in  a  state  of  miserable  darkness  as  to 
women's  clubs.  Surely  there  are  vast  misappre- 
hensions somewhere." 

"  There  surely  are,"  admitted  the  Professor. 

"  But  how  do  you  explain  them  ?  " 

"  The  women  ?  " 

"  The  clubs." 

"  By  woman's  revolt  against  her  segregation. 
Not,  in  my  opinion,  that  she  is  protesting  against 
the  gregarious  advantages  of  man,  but  because  she 
is  beginning  to  discover  that  her  sisters  are  worth 

84 


Stitches  and  Links 


knowing.  She  has  begun  to  be  impersonally  inter- 
ested in,  as  well  as  interesting  to,  the  other  woman. 
The  woman's  desire  is  not  improvement;  it  is, 
whether  she  knows  it  or  not,  the  other  woman, 
precisely  as  a  man's  interest  in  his  club  is  the  other 
man.  It  has  been  said  that  a  man  often  goes  to 
his  club  to  be  alone,  and  that  there  is  this  advan- 
tage in  a  club  that  is  a  place,  over  a  club  that  is  a 
state  of  mind.  But  a  woman  goes  to  a  club  not  to 
be  alone.  I  suppose  there  are  times  when  it  would 
do  a  woman  good  to  get  away  from  her  family,  not 
into  company,  but  into  lonesome  quiet.  Mrs. 
Moody,  who  has  said  so  many  wise  things,  declares 
in  her  '  Unquiet  Sex '  that  college  girls  are  too  little 
alone  for  the  health  of  their  nerves.  This  may  be 
so,  yet  women's  clubs  are  contemporaneous  with 
girls'  colleges.  It  begins  to  look  as  if  it  was  at 
college  that  the  American  girl  learned  that  it  is  not 
good  for  woman  to  be  alone  —  even  with  her  family. 
At  any  rate,  that  independence  which  is  so  charac- 
teristic of  the  American  girl,  which  is,  as  I  have 
been  informed  and  believe,  somewhat  disconcerting 
to  men,  is,  undoubtedly,  largely  the  result  of  the 
American  girl's  improved  relations  with  her  sister 
women.  When  she  is  as  successfully  gregarious 
with  regard  to  women  as  men  are  with  regard  to 
men,  her  sex  maturity  will  be  complete.  I  know 
that  you  are  wondering  what  sort  of  a  woman  she 
is  going  to  be  in  that  matured  state.  Have  no 
anxiety.  She  will  not  be  less  agreeable,  but  more 
so.    She  will  overdo  the  clubs,  but  she  will  recover 

85 


Miss  America 


from  that ;  she  will  shed  them  the  moment  they 
cease  to  serve  her  purpose.  I  am  going  to  a  club 
now.  I  am  going  to  talk  to  it  about  Savonarola. 
The  club  will  be  very  well  dressed,  and  so  shall  I,  if 

I  know  myself,  and 
we  n either  of  us 
shall  let  smoke 
from  the  fateful 
fires  of  the  fifteenth 
century  blind  us 
to  the  fact  that 
we  are  living  in  the 
nineteenth." 

"All  of  which," 
I  said,  in  a  severe 
tone,  "is  illustra- 
tive of  the  fact  that 
woman  is  a  sophist 
—  though  perhaps 
I  should  say  an  ar- 
tist, for  she  uses 
life  as  so  much  material  with  which  to  construct  an 
effect." 

"  Life  is  an  art,"  remarked  the  Professor  at  the 
mirror. 

"And  you,  Professor  —  " 

But  she  was  gone.  I  understood  well  enough 
that  the  Professor  had  just  given  an  exhibition  of 
her  dexterity  in  taking  the  other  side,  taking  it 
in  a  feminine  rather  than  in  a  pugnacious  spirit. 
The  Professor's  negatives  always  remind  me  of  how 

86 


Stitches  and  Links 

affirmative  the  American  girl  is.  There  is  an  Eng- 
lish painting  called  "  Summer,"  in  which  the  artist 
(Mr.  Stephens)  gracefully  symbolizes  the  drowsy 
indolence  of  June.  This  classic  allegory  may  not 
have  the  English  girl  specifically  in  mind,  but 
I  am  quite  certain  that  we  should  not  be  satisfied 
with  an  American  symbol  for  the  same  idea  which 
did  not  in  some  way  indicate  that  Miss  America, 
even  in  summer,  is  likely  to  be  representing  some 


enthusiasm,  Pickwickian  or  not  as  you  may  choose 
to  make  it  out.  The  spirit  of  fantasy,  sitting  in  the 
midst  of  our  variegated  life,  who  should  call  up  the 
American  Summer  Girl,  must  summon  a  different 
company.  The  spirit  of  fantasy  would  know  that 
the  American  summer  girl,  though  she  can  be  a 
sophist,  and  agree  that  this  or  that  is  the  fashion 
this  summer,  is  nevertheless  not  to  be  painted  as  a 
reiteration.  It  frequently  was  remarked  of  the 
Americans  at  Santiago  that  they  had  great  individ- 

87 


Miss  America 


ual  force  as  fighters.  There  always  will  be  critics 
to  remark  upon  the  hazard  of  this  trait  in  war. 
At  all  events  it  was  and  is  an  American  trait. 
And  in  conducting  her  summer  campaign  against 
an  elusive  if  not  altogether  a  smokeless  enemy, 
Miss  America  is  displaying  the  same  trait.  She 
can  accept  a  social  sophistry,  but  you  must  leave 
her  individuality.  She  will  not  have  tennis  wholly 
put  aside  if  she  does  not  choose.  She  will  not  give 
up  her  horse  because  a  little  steed  of  steel  has 
entered  the  lists,  nor  give  up  her  bicycle  because  it 
has  become  profanely  popular.  She  may  choose  to 
arm  herself  solely  with  a  parasol,  to  detach  herself 
from  even  the  suggestion  of  a  hobby,  which,  to  one 
who  has  the  individual  skill,  is  a  notoriously  potent 
way  in  which  to  establish  one  of  those  absolute 
despotisms  so  familiar  and  so  fatal  in  society. 
There  is  the  girl  with  a  butterfly  net,  the  girl  who 
goes  a-fishing,  the  girl  who  swims,  the  girl  who 
wears  bathing  suits,  the  girl  who  gives  a  sparkle  to 
the  Chautauqua  meetings  in  the  summer,  the  girl 
who  gets  up  camping  parties,  the  girl  who  gets  up 
the  dances,  the  girl  who  plots  theatricals,  the  girl 
with  the  camera,  the  girl  who  can  shoot  like  a  cow- 
boy,—  where  should  we  end  that  remarkable  list? 
How  impossible  to  express  the  summer  girl  in  any 
single  type  ? 

Indeed,  the  American  girl's  methods  of  amusing 
herself  are  so  various  as  to  make  it  increasingly 
difficult  to  typify  her  at  all,  except  as  a  goddess 
who,  like  Minerva  (though  she  did  not  go  in  much 

88 


Stitches  and  Links 


for  amusing  herself),  shall  illustrate  a  wide  range 
of  activities  serenely  and  successfully  undertaken. 
There  is  a  triteness  in  the  accomplishments  of  any 
period,  yet  the  spirit  of  individualism  in  the  Ameri- 
can girl  introduces  here,  as  elsewhere,  a  diversifying 
element.  I  was  reading  the  other  day  that  Miss 
Mitford  had  that  "  faculty  for  reciting  verses  which 
is  among  the  most  graceful  of  accomplishments." 
Where  have  all  the  verse  reciters  gone  ?  Why  did 
this  elegant  accomplishment  perish?  Are  we  all  less 
poetical  ?  Are  our  girls  losing  that  sense  of  senti- 
ment to  which  we  used  to  look  for  so  many  of  their 
quieter  charms  ?  Has  this  change  anything  to  do 
with  another  change,  surely  not  to  be  lightly  ac- 
cepted, which  has  of  late  years  taken  poetry  from 
the  top  of  the  page,  where  we  once  thought  it  be- 
longed of  natural  right,  and  placed  it  at  the  bottom  ? 
Is  it  finally  to  be  crowded  off  the  page  altogether? 
Has  the  fact  that  women  no  longer  consider  verse  an 
accomplishment  anything  to  do  with  this  subtle  but 
revolutionary  change  ?  And  what  shall  poetry  say  ? 
Will  poetry  go  on  as  it  has  from  the  beginning  of 
time  arming  us  with  epithets  of  praise? 

If  she  be  not  so  to  me, 
What  care  I  how  fair  she  be  ? 

I  must  ask  the  Professor  some  day  what  she 
thinks  of  the  disappearance  of  poetry  —  she  would 
tell  me  to  say  verse  —  as  an  accomplishment.  For 
of  course  we  cannot  afford  to  ignore  the  significance 
of  accomplishments,  their    influence  either  upon 

91 


Miss  America 


those  who  display  or  upon  those  who  observe  them. 
Accomplishments  are  more  than  an  armor,  a  decora- 
tion, —  they  are  a  vent.  A  boy  has  his  fling  ;  a  girl 
must  have  her  accomplishments.  It  is  long  since 
hobbies  were  fitted  with  a  side-saddle,  and  we  have 
had  no  occasion  to  resent  the  general  results.  The 
concrete  effect  upon  individual  men  is  sometimes 
disquieting,  but  that  is  another  matter.  Miss 
America  is,  after  all,  especially  accomplished  in 
what  she  knows.  The  product  of  a  system  by 
which  the  limits  of  her  information  are  the  limits  of 
her  curiosity,  —  for,  in  general,  she  is  not  prohibited 
from  reading  the  newspapers,  —  she  has  acquired  a 
faculty  which  may,  for  aught  I  know,  have  super- 
seded her  quotation  of  verse, —  the  faculty  for 
quoting  facts.  Yes,  she  still  quotes,  and  the  newer 
accomplishment,  if  less  elegant,  is  not  one  which  we 
may  scorn  or  overlook.  If  in  Tennyson's  phrase, 
she  is  part  of  all  that  she  has  seen,  we  might  add 
"  in  print,"  as  a  supplemental  explanation  of  her 
attitude  of  mind. 

Perhaps  if  the  author  of  "  Les  Miserables " 
saw  her  at  certain  times  he  might  use  the  quali- 
fied praise  he  applied  to  the  Parisians  when  he 
called  them  "  frivolous  but  intelligent."  Yet  if 
St.  Jerome  had  seen  her  on  the  beach  I  hardly 
think  he  could  have  had  the  heart  to  say,  "  I 
entirely  forbid  a  young  lady  to  bathe."  Her 
whole  effect  is  qualifying.  She  carries  into  all 
her  enthusiasms  a  modifying  reservation.  The 
trait  is  typified  and  illustrated  for  us  when  we 

92 


Stitches  and  Links 


see  her  coming  home  from  the  reading  club  on 
a  wheel,  or  carrying  her  novel  to  breakfast.  The 
social  hysteric  always  is  sure  that  something  dread- 
ful is  going  to  happen,  and  then,  in  one  of  those 
sensational  hairbreadth  escapes  in  which  nature 
delights,  the  thing  does  not  happen.  The  hys- 
teric has  overlooked  the  reservation  by  which 
the  fad  escapes  monomania,  by  which  the  enthu- 
siasm is  subordinated  to  its  owner. 

Intermittently  her  enthusiasms  bring  up  the  ven- 
erable charge  of  mannishness.  A  hundred  years 
ago  the  editor  of  the  London  "Times"  complained 
savagely  that  women  were  becoming  wickedly  mas- 
culine. "  Their  hunting,  shooting,  driving,  cricket- 
ing,   fencing,    faroing    and    skating,"    he  cried, 

93 


Miss  America 


"  present  a  monstrous  chaos  of  absurdity  not  only 
making  day  and  night  hideous  but  the  sex  itself 
equivocal.  Lady-men  or  men-ladies,  '  you  '11  say 
it 's  Persian,  but  let  it  be  changed.'  "  Ptahhotpou 
the  ancient  Egyptian  has  something  to  the  same 
effect,  but  I  have  forgotten  his  phrase. 


94 


V 


"WHAT  IS   GOING   ON    IN  SOCIETY" 

ONE  day  it  happened 
with  me,  as  with  many 
another  impatient  traveler, 
that  I  had  to  spend  two 
hours  between  trains  in  a 
certain  obscure  town.  Per- 
haps I  should  say,  in  a  cer- 
tain obscure  railway  station, 
for  the  town  was  singularly 
vague,  uninviting  and  irre- 
sponsive, not  at  all  the  sort 
of  place  that  one  would  expect  to  know  what  to  do 
with.  It  was,  indeed,  the  fragment  of  a  town,  as  if, 
in  the  sprinkling  of  villages  along  the  railway,  the 
materia!  at  this  point  ran  short,  leaving  barely  a 
sufficient  supply  of  elemental  features.  And  being 
confronted  by  the  unprofitableness  of  the  prospect, 

91 


Miss  America 


—  by  the  drowsy,  straggling  street,  running  (the 
word  sounds  ironical)  from  the  station,  the  un- 
friendly stare  of  the  town  hall,  plastered  over  with 
play  bills ;  the  sunburned  whiteness  of  the  little 
church  ;  the  obvious  taciturnity  of  the  man  smok- 
ing in  front  of  the  general  merchandise  store,  —  I 
bought  the  local  paper,  for  there  was  a  local  paper, 
with  a  "  patent  outside,"  that  occurred  every  Friday 
morning.  And  the  first  thing  that  struck  my  eye 
in  the  local  paper  was  a  conspicuous  headline : 
"  What  is  Going  on  in  Society." 

I  had  seen  the  thing  before  in  other  papers,  in 
Chicago,  in  Boston,  in  Washington,  in  Atlanta,  and 
in  the  provincial  habit  that  falls  to  a  man  who  thinks 
of  life  from  the  view-point  of  a  big  city,  I  had  asso- 
ciated the  line  with  something  very  different  from 
any  conditions  that  seemed  likely  to  be  present 
here.  I  looked  out  of  the  station  window  at  the 
little  white  church,  at  the  chromatic  town  hall,  at  the 
general  merchandise  store,  at  a  neat  girl  with  a  tan 
cape  who  was  coming  down  the  main  street,  —  and 
turned  with  curiosity  to  the  society  column. 

It  was  just  the  same  as  any  other.  It  had  all  the 
adjectives  of  New  York,  or  Richmond,  or  St. 
Louis,  and  if  Voltaire  had  been  reading  it  he  might 
have  hesitated  to  say  that  the  adjective  is  the  enemy 
of  the  noun.  Evidently,  too,  the  same  things  were 
going  on  that  were  going  on  elsewhere  in  society. 
It  appeared  especially  that  Miss  Effie  So-and-So 
had  just  "  come  out,"  and  that  the  event  was  signal- 
ized on  Monday  evening  by  a  dance  which  was  de- 

96 


"  In  Society ' 


scribed  at  length  as  to  the  spacious  drawing-rooms, 
the  floral  devices,  the  orchestra  behind  the  fringe  of 
palms,  the  cotillion,  the  favors,  the  elegant  gown  of 
Miss  So-and-So's  mother,  the  gowns  and  ornaments 
of  the  other  feminine  guests,  in  detail,  with  a  cor- 
dial closing  word  for  the  refreshments,  which  had 
been  served  at  eleven  o'clock.  On  Tuesday  night 
there  had  been  a  birthday  dance  at  the  Sheriff's,  at 
which  "  society  was  largely  represented  "  ;  at  a  pink 
tea  on  Wednesday  afternoon  there  had  been  some 
novel  decorations  at  small  tables  ;  and  on  Thursday 
evening  the  young  ladies  of  the  Polaris  Club  had 
gone  over  to  Sudley's  with  Mrs.  So-and-So  as 
chaperon.  There  was  more  as  to  a  festival  in 
preparation  by  the  ladies  of  the  First  Church,  as  to 
a  euchre  party  for  the  following  Thursday,  and  as 
to  a  little  surprise  which  it  was  whispered  that 
"  some  society  men  "  were  arranging  for  the  close 
of  the  season. 

Here,  certainly,  was  food  for  thought.  Could 
anything  more  piquantly  have  illustrated  the  rela- 
tivity of  the  term  Society,  more  brilliantly  have 
demolished  the  pretension  that  Society  has  any 
geography  ?  We  have  our  book  definitions,  by 
which  we  agree  glibly  to  say  that  society  is  the  cul- 
tured, the  fashionable,  the  favored  class  (or  elsewise, 
according  to  your  dictionary)  of  "  any  community  "  ; 
but  how  easy  it  is  for  city  pretence  (and  provincial- 
ism is  never  so  arrogant  as  in  big  cities)  to  see  in 
its  own  set  the  true  title  to  social  eminence.  It  is 
indicative  of  that  interesting  individualism  which 


Miss  America 


prevails  in  the  United  States,  and  which  perhaps  we 
may  learn  to  prize  as  one  of  the  precious  products 
of  democracy,  that  no  town  regards  itself  as  small 
in  any  sense  that  shall  restrict  or  disqualify  its  indi- 
viduals. This  is  particularly  true  of  towns  in  their 
feminine  population.  You  may  find  a  community 
without  gas,  electric  light,  telephones  or  a  board  of 

trade,  but  you 
shall  not  on  that 
account  decide 
that  it  istoo  small 
to  have  a  woman's 
club  and  a  social 
calendar.  We  are 
accustom  ed  to  say 
that  it  all  is  a 
question  of  de- 
gree. 

"When  Adam  delved 

and  Eve  span 
Who  was  then  the 
gentleman  ? 

We  are  accus- 
tomed to  admit 
that  in  the  senate  of  society  even  the  small  states 
shall  say  their  say.  But  scarcely  can  we  realize 
without  much  travel  how  far  the  fact  that  this 
country  is  too  big  for  the  focussing  of  society  in 
any  one,  two,  or  dozen  places,  affects  the  demeanor 
and  development  of  the  social  units.  The  fact  that 
there  are  widely  prevalent  formulae,  helps  us  first  to 
the  assumption,  safe  enough,  that  these  are  applied, 

98 


/ 


"  In  Society" 


that  there  is  a  wish  and  an  occasion  to  use  them  in 
some  way.  They  help  us  further  to  an  estimate  of 
the  relative  activity  of  social  forces,  to  the  points 
of  emphasis.  But  there  is  one  thing  the  wide  use 
of  formula?  never  will  help  you  to  find  out,  and  that 
is  the  most  interesting  fact  of  all  —  the  local  flavor 
of  the  conformity. 
Society  is  an  Estab- 
lished Church  in 
whose  pews  the  dis- 
senters form  a  ma- 
jority;  and  if  I  could, 
by  some  chance,  have 
let  my  train  go  by  and 
have  been  admitted 
into  the  circle  of  that 
village  society,  I  cer- 
tainly should  have 
found  that  while  it 
gave  a  sort  of  lip- 
service  to  the  social 
creeds,  this  society 
had  its  own  way 
of  doing  so,  and  that  it  adopted  lightheartedly, 
like  its  new  byword  or  improved  flounce,  certain 
phrases,  certain  dicta  of  the  world's  larger  social 
groups,  for  its  own  purposes,  with  its  own  reser- 
vations. I  do  not  deny  that  I  have  seen  social 
formulae  grimly  and  mechanically  used  in  certain 
quarters,  but  the  whimsical  reservation  is  more 
characteristic. 

99 


Miss  America 


The  American  girl  is  so  definitely  a  social  crea- 
ture, and  her  social  attributes  are  so  personal,  that 
she  never  appears  to  be  dependent  upon  social 
machinery.  She  brings  into  society  the  invaluable 
force  of  her  individual  availability.  That  our  social 
groups  seem  to  cohere  proves  that  she  must  possess 
in  some  degree  that  deference  to  form  which  begins 
in  the  acceptance  of  terms.  Humanity  can  never 
pair  well  until  it  has  grouped  well.  Grouping  is 
the  beginning  of  that  compromise  which  reaches  its 
crisis  in  pairing.  Even  the  goddess  of  democracy, 
who  is  presumed  to  dote  upon  calling  a  spade  a 
spade,  who  hates  the  euphemisms  of  effete  monar- 
chical society,  may  not  despise  the  butler's  baritone 
or  the  futility  of  attempting  on  one  occasion  six 
hundred  different  forms  of  adieu.  Even  George 
Eliot  admitted  that  "  a  little  unpremeditated  insin- 
cerity must  be  indulged  in  under  the  stress  of 
social  intercourse."  The  trouble  with  unpremedi- 
tated insincerities,  however,  is  that  you  often  wish 
you  had  n't  said  them,  not  (unfortunately  for 
the  symmetry  of  the  retribution)  because  they 
were  insincere,  but  because  they  were  unpre- 
meditated and  inferior.  It  is  much  safer  to  be 
unpremeditated  with  sincerities  than  with  insin- 
cerities, and,  as  the  literature  of  social  satire  may 
help  us  to  see,  there  is  great  hazard  in  any  case. 
It  is  a  pity,  perhaps,  that  the  great  advantages  of 
meeting  your  kind  in  your  and  their  best  clothes, 
must  be  bought  so  dearly,  yet,  as  Thackeray  has 
observed,  "  if  we  may  not  speak  of  the  lady  who 

IOO 


"In  Society" 


has  just  left  the  room,  what  is  to  become  of  con- 
versation and  society  ?  " 

Social  custom  is  so  arbitrary  that  it  might  be,  and 
doubtless  would  be,  a  reckless  and  inconclusive 
thing  for  any  one  to  assume  that  the  American  girl 
in  society  is  actually  so  radical  as  her  reputation  in 
other  avenues  might  suggest.  I  believe  that  it  is 
quite  commonly  agreed  that  while  the  French  girl 
in  society  is,  perforce,  much  more  reserved  than  the 
American,  the  English  girl  at  a  ball  or  an  "  even- 
ing "  exhibits  a  freedom  from  restraint  not  com- 
monly seen  in  America.  These  things,  however, 
count  for  little  except  as  showing  the  domination 
of  mere  form,  for  there  can  be  no  doubt  that  in 
social  life,  using  the  term  broadly,  the  American 
girl  has  more  liberty,  and  uses  more  liberty  than 
the  English  girl.  If  the  privileges  of  a  host's  roof 
are  liberally  construed  by  the  English  girl,  the 
American  girl  takes  a  candid  and  undaunted  view  of 
a  hotel  and  a  public  ballroom  ;  and  under  conditions 
which  in  any  manner  detach  her  from  the  immediate 
presence  of  formality,  she  falls  back  upon  her  indi- 
vidual preferences,  her  personally  developed  methods 
of  meeting  situations,  with  a  readiness  and  sureness 
that  carry  their  own  vindication.  Because  she  can 
have  a  developed  individuality  yet  be  no  rebel,  the 
American  girl  can  grasp  and  enjoy  liberty  without 
despising  authority.  Indeed,  her  very  possession 
of  liberty  must  develop  a  certain  personal  conserva- 
tism which  as  a  mere  subject  of  authority  she  might 
never   acquire.     A    great   many   fantastic  things 

1Q3 


Miss  America 


which  at  various  times  have  been  said  about  the 
American  girl  might  appear  to  have  been  uttered 
in  ignorance  of  the  fact  that  there  is  an  American 
mother. 

I  have  in  mind  a  family  living  in  Washington 
city,  where  there  is,  as  everyone  knows,  a  highly 
seasoned  and  heterogeneous  society,  a  society  ut- 
terly different  from  any  that  is  to  be  met  with  else- 
where in  this  country,  and  one  which  on  that 
account  offers  peculiarly  excellent  opportunities  for 
study  on  the  part  of  those  foreign  observers  who 
enjoy  being  misled  about  us.  If  there  is  any  place 
in  the  United  States  where  the  American  mother 
has  opportunity  for  her  administrative  genius,  it  is 
at  the  national  capital.  The  peculiar  conditions 
created  by  political,  diplomatic  and  administrative 
forces  in  the  capital  of  a  republic,  the  prevalence 
of  the  open  door,  and  the  presence  of  both 
domestic  and  foreign  transients  who  do  not  always 
appreciate  the  limitations  of  liberal  custom,  make 
Washington  a  place  apart.  A  single  instance  may 
serve  to  illustrate  the  firmness  of  the  women  who 
actually  control  social  destiny.  Under  circum- 
stances which  it  is  not  necessary  to  detail,  a  certain 
elegant  attache  of  one  of  the  legations  began  calling 
upon  the  young  lady  of  the  family  I  have  named. 
He  was  a  handsome  and  entertaining  young  man, 
easy  with  women  and  cordial  with  men,  glib  in  the 
arts,  himself  a  good  singer,  and  speaking  English 
with  a  fascinating  inflection.  One  evening  the  mother 
said  quietly  to  the  daughter  :  "  Grace,  the  next  time 

.104 


"  In  Society  " 

the  Count  calls  I  wish  that  you  would  ask  to  be  ex- 
cused." The  daughter  looked  her  astonishment. 
She  was  not  greatly  interested  in  the  count,  yet  he 
was  very  agreeable,  and  she  said  so.  But  her  mother 
said,  "  Grace,  you  must  trust  me."  And  when  the 
count  came  again  he  was  made  to  understand. 

It  was  a  simple,  unsensational  incident,  but  be- 
cause I  knew  the  liberal  ethics  of  the  mother  and 
the  apparently  complete  independence  of  the  daughter 
(she  was  twenty-three)  the  incident  the  more  effec- 
tively reminded  me  that  though  the  American 
mother  does  not  feel  it  incumbent  upon  her  to 
closely  hover  over  her  offspring  with  a  solicitous 
wing,  she  not  the  less  observes  and  governs.  It  so 
happened  that  the  gilded  count  a  few  months  later 
became  involved  in  so  gross  a  scandal  that  his 
withdrawal  from  Washington  became  imperative. 
Influence  in  his  government  saved  him  from  worse 
annoyance  than  transfer  to  another  court.  The 
mother's  instinct  had  been  true.  And  who  can 
doubt  that  a  liberally  reared  girl,  when  she  herself 
assumes  the  office  of  mother,  will,  without  having 
to  make  sinister  payment  for  her  knowledge,  be  the 
better  equipped  for  a  judgment  of  the  world  in  the 
interest  of  those  who  may  be  dependent  upon  her 
authority  ? 

That  the  American  mother  cares  more  for  real 
than  for  apparent  authority,  explains,  to  those  who 
know,  the  visible  and  so  often  misleading  detach- 
ment of  the  daughter ;  and  the  daughter's  sense  of 
a  dependence  that  is  not  irksome,  a  suzerainty  that 

105 


Miss  America 


is  not  intrusive,  a  mother  care  that  has  no  vanity  of 
assertion,  appears  in  her  freer  bearing,  her  finer  self- 
reliance.  Whatever  her  special  gifts,  meeting  her 
socially  always  is  likely  to  have  the  charm  associated 
with  the  fact  that  she  never  is  afraid  either  that  she 
will  not  rise  to  the  occasion  or  that  she  will  offend 
authority.  She  has  not  the  first  fear  because  she  is 
playing  her  own  game.  She  has  not  the  second 
because  she  does  not  live  in  a  threatening  or  too 
admonitory  shadow. 

You  think  of  these  things  sometimes  when  you 
sit  opposite  a  fan.  Her  fan  !  Have  you  not  seen 
it  blot  out  at  the  critical  moment  all  that  was  worth 
looking  at  in  the  world  ?  Have  you  not  realized 
that  it  is  part  of  her  panoply  ?  Have  you  not  wit- 
nessed over  and  over  again  the  genius  which  she 
exhibits  in  the  management  of  accessories?  Have 
you  not  heard  in  the  flutter  of  her  fan  a  note  from 
that  orchestra  of  sounds  in  which  she  makes  even 
her  silk  petticoat  play  a  witching  part? 

With  her  fan  you  quite  naturally  associate  those 
two  absolutely  unanswerable  arguments  —  an  Ameri- 
can girl's  eyes.  They  are  different,  believe  me, 
these  American  eyes,  from  any  other  sort.  The 
women  of  no  other  country  can  look  at  you 
that  way.  You  must  admit,  and  in  some  degree 
understand  this,  or  you  cannot  hope  to  under- 
stand Miss  America  in  society  or  anywhere  else. 
You  may  say  of  her  eyes  what  Darwin  hinted  of 
eyes  in  general,  that  they  are  the  supreme  physical 
paradox.    They  do  not  peer  like  the  virgin  eyes  of 

106 


"  In  Society  " 


poetical  tradition.  It  has  been  complained  that 
they  have  not  at  all  the  inquiring  look  once  thought 
to  be  so  winsome  in  the  young.  They  seem  to 
know,  yet  they  are  too  feminine  to  assert.  We  say 
hard  things  about  the  poets  nowadays,  but  who  can 
blame  the  poets  for  becoming  emotional  over  her 
eyes  ?  Are  eyes  ever  more  a  mystery,  a  contra- 
diction, an  uncombattable  force  than  when  Miss 
America  turns  upon  us  her  gentle  yet  fearless,  her 
wise  yet  maidenly  orbs  ?  We  may  have  planned  a 
battle.  We  may  have  girded  ourselves  for  a  glance 
toward  these  twin  guns  in  that  implacable  turret,  but 
at  the  first  encounter  our  bravado  withers.  When 
she  uses  these  weapons  as  she  pre-eminently  knows 
how,  we  declare  the  motion  carried — the  eyes 
have  it. 

So  soon  as  we  grasp  the  fact  that  Miss  America 
can  look  and  talk,  we  are  in  a  fair  way  to  under- 
stand some  of  the  secrets  of  her  power.  It  is  quite 
generally  admitted  that  she  talks  well,  and  very 
seldom,  I  think,  with  any  disparaging  reservation. 
She  is  a  good  talker.  She  is  more  ;  she  is  a  good 
conversationalist,  for  she  can  listen.  If  speech  is 
silver  and  silence  is  golden,  I  am  free  to  admit  that 
Miss  America  does  not  seem  to  believe  altogether 
in  the  gold  standard.  She  appears  to  be  somewhat 
of  a  bi-metallist.  I  don't  blame  her  ;  and  I  always 
admire  her  method  of  dealing  with  men  who  believe 
in  the  free  silver  of  continuous  talk. 

Her  reserve  here  is  characteristic  of  her  agreeable 
poise  in  society  whenever  and  wherever  she  is  called 

109 


Miss  America 


upon  to  say  the  right  thing  at  the  right  time.  She 
never  exhibits  stage  fright,  though  she  has  con- 
fessed (afterward)  to  the  symptoms.  If,  like  Isa- 
bella, she  is  "  loth  to  speak  so  indirectly,"  she 
does  n't  show  it.  She  may,  indeed,  like  the  Venus 
of  Melos,  be  disarmed,  but  she  never  will  be  found, 
like  the  Winged  Victory,  to  have  lost  her  head. 
Foreigners  sometimes  have  said  that  Miss  America 

talks  too  loudly,  but 
I  am  sure  that  this 
effect  arises  from  her 
vivacity,  and  one 
might  retort  that  if 
her  enunciation  ever 
is  more  than  neces- 
sarily audible  the 
chances  are  al  1  in 
favor  of  your  being 
glad  that  you  did 
not  miss  a  word. 

Sometimes  she 
has  a  way  of  talking 
to  you  at  an  oblique  angle.  She  likes  to  banter 
while  she  pours  tea,  for  example,  parrying  and 
thrusting  with  the  agility  of  one  of  those  Viennese 
girls  who  know  how  to  fence  with  a  blade  in 
each  hand.  When  Mme.  De  Stael  declared  that 
conversation,  "  like  talent,  exists  only  in  France," 
Miss  America  had  not  grown  up.  It  still  is  true, 
probably,  as  Mrs.  Poyser  pointed  out,  that  a 
woman  "  can  count  a  stocking  top  while  a  man's 

1 10 


"  In  Society" 


gitting  his  tongue  ready."  Man's  development 
has  been  distressingly  slow.  He  never  has  met 
but  indifferently  the  supreme  test  of  the  tete-a- 
tete.  It  may  be  that  his  habits  of  life  dispose 
him  to  take  an  exaggerated,  sometimes  even  a 
morbid,  view  of  the  hazard  of  words.  Regard- 
ing the  situation  solemnly  is  fatal  to  facility.  The 
situation  is  not,  and  cannot  be,  intrinsically  sol- 


emn, being  devised  to  get  away  from  solemnity. 
The  talk  is  no  more  momentous  than  the  tea. 
Neither  is  an  end,  but  only  a  means.  "  It  grieves 
my  heart,"  cried  Addison,  "  to  see  a  couple  of 
proud,  idle  flirts  sipping  their  tea  for  a  whole 
afternoon  in  a  room  hung  round  with  the  industry 
of  their  great-grandmothers."  Now  this  comment, 
surely,  represents  a  most  unwholesome  frame  of 
mind,  subversive  of  that  relaxation  which  Delsarte 
and  many  charming  women  disciples  have  bidden 
us  cultivate. 

1 1 1 


Miss  America 


Alas  !  it  would  be  a  good  thing  if  sipping  tea 
for  a  whole  afternoon  in  one  room  were  the  worst 
sin  practised  by  our  young  women.  Sipping  tea 
in  a  dozen  rooms  on  the  same  afternoon  is  surely 
a  worse  matter.  In  the  days  when  people  gave 
up  a  whole  afternoon  to  a  call,  conversational 
stitching  and  tea  drinking  were  reduced  to  a  science, 
and  gossip  to  a  line  art.  In  a  later  day,  when  the 
author  of  the  Synthetic  Philosophy  found  occa- 
sion to  marvel  over  and  to  lament  the  velocity  with 
which  men  and  women  were  going  about  their 
affairs  in  this  country,  calling  customs  had  utterly 
changed.  If  our  women  had  undertaken  to  per- 
petuate throughout  the  year  the  New  Year's  Day 
habits  of  the  sociable  Dutch  of  Manhattan,  they 
could  not  have  been  more  successful.  The  po- 
tency of  pasteboard  and  the  human  imagination 
have  not  greatly  diminished  the  pressure,  and  will 
not  so  long  as  the  intoxication  of  mere  rapidity 
continues  to  preserve  its  power.  The  Autocrat  of 
the  Breakfast  Table  has  colloquially  expressed  the 
distressing  celerity  with  which  certain  classes  of 
fashionable  women  rush  in,  laugh,  talk,  eat  and 
disappear,  in  the  tersely  alliterative  "  giggle,  gabble, 
gobble,  git." 

These  habits  are,  of  course,  utterly  destructive 
of  good  talk.  Modern  society  talk  under  the 
pressure  of  numbers  and  a  consent  to  oscillate  vio- 
lently, is  like  the  scattered  fragments  of  a  word 
game.  A  man  —  I  cannot  speak  for  a  woman  — 
emerges  from    a    "  crush "    with    fresh  emotions 

I  I  2 


"  In  Society" 


toward  the  grotesquely  ironical  definition  of  words 
as  the  vehicle  of  thought. 

However,  I  am  glad  to  think  that  Miss  America 
does  not  seek  to  revive  the  spectacular  talking  such 
as  women  did  in  the  days  of  the  old  French  salons. 
A  woman  talking  to  a  dozen  men  at  the  same  time 
may  have  been  a  charming  affair.  Mme.  Recamier 
is  credited  with  having  done  it  very  well.  But 
no  sane  and  truthful  man  ever  will  admit  his 
contentment  with  the  microscopic  fragment  of  a 
woman's  attention.  Exclusive  interest  in  a  woman 
is  undoubtedly  a  primitive  instinct,  yet  the  great 
deference  paid  to  success  in  the  tete-a-tete  well  may 
justify  this  instinctive  preference,  and  those  hostesses 
surely  will  be  most  successful  who  devise  some 
liberty  for  this  instinct.  The  tendency  of  our 
social  life  is  doubtless  against  centralization.  There 
can  be  no  more  monologists,  it  seems.  "  The 
worst  of  hearing  Carlyle,"  said  Margaret  Fuller, 
"  is  that  you  cannot  interrupt  him."  The  modern 
social  gathering,  whatever  its  aims  or  variations, 
is  quite  sure  at  least  of  this  quality,  —  that  it  will  in- 
terrupt. We  cannot  deny  that  even  "  One-Minute 
Conversations  with  Nice  Girls "  is  an  experience 
having  its  compensations  as  well  as  its  drawbacks, 
for  while  a  few  eloquent  seconds  with  many  women 
may  not  be  so  desirable  in  some  ways  as  many 
eloquent  seconds  with  one  woman,  it  always 
must  be  difficult  to  know  beforehand  just  when 
this  will  be  the  case.    Mr.  Warner  has  shrewdly 

"5 


Miss  America 


pointed  out  that  some  women  are  interesting  for 
five  minutes,  some  for  ten,  some  for  an  hour; 
"  some,"  he  adds,  "  are  not  exhausted  in  a  whole 
day  ;  and  some  (and  this  shows  the  signal  leniency 
of  Providence)  are  perennially  entertaining,  even 
in  the  presence  of  masculine  stupidity."  The  trou- 
ble is  (as  you  might  guess)  that  the  interruption 
always  cuts  you  off  at  the  end  of  three  minutes 
with  the  girl  who  would  be  interesting  for  a  whole 
day.  For  aught  I  know,  society  may  have  averaged 
this  thing,  and  have  discovered  that  the  low  limit 
is  safest,  that  it  leaves  both  parties  most  completely 
in  possession  of  the  benefit  of  the  doubt.  But  how 
few  men  can  start  a  new  conversation  every  ninety 
seconds  with  anything  like  the  success  that  attends 
a  woman's  efforts  to  do  the  same  thing  ? 

No,  woman,  who  created  Society  with  its  capital 
letter,  has  succeeded,  whether  by  design  or  accident, 
in  producing  a  situation  in  which  she  is  placed  at 
a  very  definite  advantage.  She  can  riddle  a  man 
with  deadly  small  shot  before  he  can  roll  up  his 
heavy  guns.  Yet  she  never  will  like  the  man  who 
either  refuses  the  close  order  or  surrenders.  She 
will  like  him  best  if  he  "  puts  up  a  good  fight." 
If  he  stammers,  she  knows  just  how  to  deal  with 
his  broken  English  and  keep  him  going.  Quot 
linguae,  tot  homines.  But  you  cannot  multiply  a 
woman  that  way.  One  language  is  all  that  she 
needs.  Small  talk  is  a  large  question.  As  the 
loose  change  of  vocal  currency,  it  is  an  indispensa- 

116 


"  In  Society" 


ble  commodity.  The  larger  denominations  are 
not  available.  As  for  cashing  an  intellectual  check, 
good  as  your  credit  may  be,  it  is  out  of  the  question 
altogether ;  and  a  wise  man  recognizes  the  fact  that 
in  the  matter  of  this  commodity  woman  is  a  banker 
who  must  always  pocket  a  margin. 

One  day  in  a  far  Southwestern  city  the  belle  of 
the  place  drove  me  in  a  dogcart  for  a  memorable 
half  hour.  She  was  no  taller  than  I,  but  she  wore 
a  magnificent  hat,  one  of  those  hats  which  even  the 
girl  could  not  make  you  forget,  and  as  she  sat  on 
the  "dinky,"  she  arose  beside  me  in  a  quelling  con- 
trast. The  horse  was  a  smart  stepper  (at  least  that 
is  my  confused  impression),  the  road  demanded  a 
discriminating  rein  ;  but  though  we  drove  past  the 
leading  hotel  in  the  crisis  of  the  event,  and  drew 
the  fire  of  a  hundred  eyes,  that  girl's  delightful  wit 
never  faltered  nor  forsook  her,  that  is  to  sav,  never 
forsook  me  ;  for,  of  course,  I  needed  a  helping  hand. 
No  man  not  specifically  trained  to  it  could  grace- 
fully maintain  himself  at  such  an  altitude  with  any 
credit  to  his  power  of  speech.  When  I  recall  that 
dashing  day,  the  roll  of  the  cart,  the  flutter  of  those 
lofty  feathers,  the  firm  grace  of  those  little  gloved 
hands,  the  healthy  glow  of  the  face  I  looked  up  to, 
I  feel  an  accentuated  humility,  a  deep  conviction  of 
my  oral  inferiority. 

In  society,  as  elsewhere,  woman  often  reminds 
us  of  her  superiority  to  the  algebraic  axiom  that 
things  which  are  equal  to  the  same  thing  are  equal 

1 19 


Miss  America 


to  each  other.  There  are  qualified  ways  in  which 
a  man  may  be  equal  to  society.  But  to  say  that  he 
is  equal  to  a  woman  —  that  is  another  matter. 

You  will  remind  me  that  society  is  not  wholly 
a  matter  of  talk,  large  or  small.  This  is  very  true. 
Among  other  things,  it  is  a  matter  of  clothes. 


1 20 


VI 


LACE  AND  DESTINY 


V 


I  CTO  R  HUGO 
thought  that  "a  book 
might  be  written  with  re- 
gard to  the  influence  of 
gold  lace  on  the  destiny  of 
nations."    Carlvle  wrote 

J 

the  book,  extending  his 
discussion  to  the  influence 
of  lace  that  is  not  golden 
on  the  destiny  of  society; 
and  one  may  scarcely  ven- 
ture a  few  tentative  words  upon  the  subject  of 
clothes  without  the  feeling  that  he  should,  properly, 
apologize  to  "Sartor  Resartus."  And  yet,  as  we 
have  many  reasons  for  remembering,  there  are  new 
clothes,  and  if  there  is  no  new  philosophy,  it  is  not 
impossible  that  the  old  philosophy  may  have  some 
new  bearings,  and  that  the  new  conditions,  as  some- 
times happens,  modify  the  application  of  the  eternal 
verities. 

Naturally  one  cannot  throw  out  even  a  casual 
suggestion  in  such  a  matter  without  realizing  that 


I  2  I 


Miss  America 


we  have  gone  very  far  from  the  primitive  stand- 
point. When  Adam  told  Eve  that  she  looked 
lovely  in  green,  the  situation  was  strikingly  differ- 
ent from  any  that  we  now  can  fancy,  not  only  with 
regard  to  the  lady,  but  with  regard  to  the  situation 
in  general,  for,  as  there  could  be  no  relativity  in  the 
sincerity  of  the  compliment,  there  could  have  been 
no  diffidence  in  receiving  it.  It  is  clear  that  either 
paying  or  receiving  a  compliment  under  such  cir- 
cumstances must  of  necessity  have  had  an  inferior 
excitement ;  yet  we  can  have  no  difficulty  in  grasp- 
ing the  fact  that  between  the  primitive  dress  reform 
situation  presented  in  the  wilds  of  Paradise,  and  the 
highly  evolved  subtleties  of  modern  dress,  lie  infinite 
ethical  complexities,  a  pyramid  of  riddles,  a  Mam- 
moth Cave  of  doubt.  It  having  been  established 
by  centuries  of  habit  that  civilized  men  and  women 
shall  always  wear  some  clothes,  and  most  of  the 
time  a  great  deal  of  them,  the  question  has  not 
the  simplicity  which  it  might  have  had  at  an 
earlier  time.  Clothes  principles  are  now  as  intricate 
as  apparel  itself.  They  are  associated  with  ages  of 
prejudice,  libraries  of  history,  acres  of  painted  art, 
mountains  of  dry  goods.  On  the  other  hand,  cer- 
tain notions  now  are  entirely  accepted,  and  the  field 
for  debate,  after  all,  is  much  narrower  than  might  at 
first  appear. 

It  may  not  be  amiss  to  remember  the  fact,  flatly 
expressed  by  Carlyle,  that  "  the  first  spiritual  want 
of  a  barbarous  man  is  decoration,  as,  indeed,  we 
still  see  among  the  barbarous  classes  in  civilized 

I  22 


Lace  and  Destiny 


countries."  In  women,  dress  is  this  "  spiritual 
want  "  touched  by  artistic  sentiment,  I  had  almost 
said  religion  ;  and  whatever  we  may  say  of  the  es- 
sential barbarism  of  the  sentiment,  it  seems  quite 
likely  to  prove  one  of  those  barbarisms  that  are 
fundamental  and  permanent.  If  we  might  remem- 
ber that  it  is  fundamental  much  of  modern  dis- 
cussion would  be  simplified.  I  find  Mr.  Finck 
giving  the  following  elements  as  explaining  the 
Fashion  Fetish  :  the  vulgar  display  of  wealth,  mil- 
liners' cunning,  the  tyranny  of  the  ugly  majority, 
cowardice  and  sheepishness.  These  are  all  good 
explanations,  but  the  list  seems  sadly  deficient  with- 
out an  allusion  to  this  instinctive  and  ineradicable 
desire  for  decoration.  Mr.  Theodore  Child  seems 
to  have  in  mind  the  instinctive  and  final  phase  of 
the  situation  when  he  bids  us  "  enjoy  in  imagina- 
tion what  the  meanness  of  the  age  refuses  to  the 
desire  of  the  eyes." 

Woman  herself  seems  to  have  adopted  the  view 
of  Epictetus  that  "  we  ought  not,  even  by  the  aspect 
of  the  body  to  scare  away  the  multitude  from  phil- 
osophy." Socrates  meant  the  same  thing  when  he 
said  to  one  of  his  too-ragged  followers,  "  I  see  thy 
vanity  shining  through  the  holes  in  thy  coat." 
Clothes,  then,  are  not  merely  to  warm  or  to  con- 
ceal, but  also  to  decorate.  Wherein  they  warm  or 
conceal,  they  are  a  science.  Wherein  they  decorate, 
they  are  an  art.  The  science  is  exact ;  the  art  is 
rich  in  variety  and  change,  making  every  other  art 
its  handmaiden,  every  season  its  holiday,  every 

123 


Miss  America 


sentiment  its  theme. 
It  is  an  art  redolent 
of  the  years,  ting- 
ling with  the  daring 
of  youth.  Above 
all,  it  is  an  art  in 
which  womanchooses 
to  express  herself  in 
a  language  free  from 
the  inhibitions  placed 
upon  other  arts,  in 
which,  ignoring  when 
she  chooses,  the  pri- 
mary excuses  and 
incentives,  she  takes 
an  art-for-art's-sake 
justification  for  show- 
ing  us  the  separate 
and  independent  fas- 
cination, in  them- 
selves, of  sublimated 
clothes.  No  one 
who  cannot  perceive 
the  inherent  interest, 
if  not  the  inherent 
justification,  of  clothes  as  clothes,  ever  can  see 
deeply  into  the  philosophy  of  dress,  or  ever  can 
see  deeply  into  the  philosophy  of  women. 

The  wide  contrast,  and  one  growing  continually 
wider,  in  the  characteristics  of  masculine  and  feminine 
dress,  on  those  occasions  when  it  most  definitely 

124 


Lace  and  Destiny 


expresses  itself  as 
dress,  might  suggest 
that  some  variation  in 
the  governing  phil- 
osophy of  each  had 
taken  place,  perhaps 
at  some  definite  time; 
for  there  was  no  such 
contrast  in  an  earlier 
day.  It  may  be  that 
at  the  time  —  and  we 
may  set  this  early  in 
the  present  century, 
easily  within  the  pe- 
riod of  our  own  na- 
tional history — when 
man  began  tosimplify 
his  attire,  to  put  aside 
all  but  the  rudest 
decorative  elements, 
woman  definitely  for- 
mulated her  justifica- 
tions for  perpetuating 
the  idea  of  clothes  for 
clothes'  sake.  We 
are  bound  to  remem- 
ber what  she  has  had 
to  live  down.  She 
has  had  to  live  down 
Oueen  Elizabeth,  and 
tinental  fashion  when 


all  the  hyperbole  of  Con- 
Continental  fashion  was  in 
125 


Miss  America 


its  most  imaginative  mood.  Political  traditions 
were  not  the  only  burdens  of  our  ambitious  young 
republic.  Think  of  the  gorgeous  head-dresses,  half 
as  tall  as  the  women  who  wore  them,  and  which 
afforded  such  delight  to  the  caricaturist !  Have 
you  ever  stopped  to  think  how  few  opportunities 
woman  gives  the  cartoonist  nowadays,  how  severe 
a  strain  she  places  upon  his  ingenuity  ?  There  may 
be  an  occasional  note  of  excess.  A  recent  foreign 
investigator  found  the  clothes  of  our  women  too 
much  so,  too  perfect  for  repose.  This  note  of 
excess  is  the  characteristic  of  genius.  I  myself  have 
seen  American  women  who,  to  a  merely  masculine 
prejudice,  seem  to  be  wearing  too  many  rings.  But 
we  must  make  reasonable  allowance  for  the  natural 
accumulations  of  time.  It  has  occurred  to  me  that 
I  might  do  as  we  may  with  a  tree,  —  tell  a  woman's 
age  by  her  rings. 

So  that  in  looking  about  and  finding  the  whole  of 
human  society  "  hooked,  and  buttoned  up  and  held 
together  by  clothes,"  we  cannot  hope  in  any  suc- 
cessful way  to  investigate  the  matter,  if  we  forget 
for  a  moment  that  the  dress  of  women  is  to  be 
looked  at  as  a  subjective  element.  Going  a  little 
way  with  logical  analysis,  and  agreeing,  for  example, 
that  "  if  the  cut  betoken  intellect  and  talent,  so  does 
color  betoken  temper  and  heart,"  we  soon  meet 
with  a  mountain  height  of  contradictions  introduced 
by  the  purely  personal  effect  of  woman  herself,  and 
we  find,  long  before  attaining  any  symmetry  of 
information,  that  woman  has  invested  certain  ma- 

1 26 


Lace  and  Destiny 


terial  elements  of  life,  as  she  has  invested  so  many- 
elements  of  life  that  are  not  material,  with  the 
interest  she  herself  has  for  us.  A  little  lace,  a  rib- 
bon she  has  worn  in  her  hair,  a  glove,  a  satin  slip- 
per, a  fan,  a  shred  of  trimming,  have  an  eloquence  in 
their  revelation  of  her,  a  fragrance  in  their  transmis- 
sion of  her  touch,  which  eludes  logic  and  confounds 
investigation.  By  a  faculty  and  privilege  of  making 
things  seem  reasonable  that  are  not  at  all  reasonable, 
by  a  witchcraft,  a  sophistry  of  fashion,  a  trick  of 
illusion,  in  the  presence  of  which  we  forget  every 
rule  of  art,  every  principle  of  proportion,  every 
prejudice  of  habit,  she  can  utterly  bewilder  us  in  a 
master  stroke  of  invincible  instinct.  She  takes,  de- 
liberately and  with  exquisite  selective  tact,  certain 
entirely  simple,  inoffensive  elements,  —  things  which 
in  themselves  you  must  acknowledge  to  be  harmless 
and  almost  rational ;  she  takes  these  simple  elements 
and  she  puts  them  together  by  a  method,  and  in  a 
manner,  of  which  no  man,  if  he  lived  to  be  one 
hundred  and  eighty-six,  ever  would  discover  the 
secret,  and,  waving  her  wizard  wand  over  the  entire 
mess,  she  calls  it  a  hat ! 

Nothing  could  be  more  preposterous,  of  course. 
When  we  study  the  thing  as  an  object  separated  from 
her,  it  might,  even  though  we  knew  that  she  had 
created  it,  excite  our  derision.  But  when  we  see 
this  masterpiece  of  absurdity  upon  her  head,  that 
which  had  seemed  at  once  an  offence  to  nature 
and  to  art,  the  acme  of  decorative  nonsense,  imme- 
diately becomes  forgivable — immediately  becomes 
9  129 


Miss  America 


right.  It  is  not  that  we  excuse  it  for  her  sake.  It 
is  not  that  the  apposition  dismays  our  reason. 
We  bow  to  it,  accept  it,  and  end  by  perceiving 
that,  whether  it  be  taken  as  an  old  fact  of  nature 
or  a  new  fact  of  genius,  it  is  unanswerable. 

No  woman  could  be  more  completely,  undebat- 
ably  sane  than  the  Professor.     I  know  what  I  am 

talking  about.  And 
yet  the  Professor 
wears  a  hat.  I  had 
occasion,  one  day, 
when  she  had  left  it 
for  a  moment  on  a 
table,  to  study  it  ana- 
lytically as  a  creation. 
It  was  a  fearful  and 
wonderful  thing.  No 
man  ever  can  forget 
the  moment  when 
first,  with  mature  de- 
liberation, and  in  a 
consciousness  of  the 
vast  significance  of 
life,  he  takes  up  a 
woman's  hat,  timorously,  as  if  it  were  a  ten-inch 
shell  or  Minerva's  helmet,  and  gazes  into  its  fragile 
fastness.  When  I  mentally  grasped,  as  a  man  may 
in  the  absence  of  the  wearer,  the  many  and  extraor- 
dinary elements  of  the  Professor's  hat;  when  I 
sought  to  associate  its  multi-colored  grotesqueness 
with  the  classic  simplicity  of  the  Professor's  pro- 

130 


Lace  and  Destiny 


file  ;  when  I  figured  its  heterogeneous  elements  as 
an  object  of  decoration  for  the  Professor's  outward 
and  visible  effect ;  when  I  fancied  the  Professor's 
brain  flashing  and  glowing  under  this  riotous  sym- 
bolism, I  was  filled  with  a  new  sense  of  the  futility 
of  reason,  a  new  awe  for  the  wonder  of  woman. 

Dr.  Holmes  has  spoken  of  the  hat  as  "  the  vulner- 
able point  of  the  ar- 
tificial integument"; 
but  plainly  he  was 
speaking  of  the  mas- 
culine hat,  for  wo- 
man's hat  is  no  vul- 
nerable point  with 
her.  It  is  her  strong 
point,  her  poi  nt  of 
vantage,  the  citadel 
ofher  sophistries. 
You  can  reason  with 
her  about  other 
things,  but  you  can- 
not reason  with  her 
about  her  hats  ;  not, 
mind  you,  because  she  will  not  listen,  but  because 
she,  or  the  hat,  makes  you  not  want  to.  This  is 
not  to  say  that  it  makes  no  difference  who  wears 
the  hat.  It  does  make  a  difference.  Take  a 
device  like  the  calash,  such  as  our  great-grand- 
mothers wore.  There  were  faces  that  did  not  look 
well  in  it,  faces  which  quite  naturally  might  have 
made   us  think   less  well   of  the  calash  for  the 

■31 


Miss  America 


moment.  Under  certain  other  circumstances  — 
that  is  to  say,  over  a  certain  other  head,  its  quaint- 
ness  begins  to  have  a  meaning,  and  it  seems  as 
natural  and  acceptable  as  anything  else  which  the 
right  face  and  the  right  person  choose  to  display 
for  us.  Thackeray  contended  that  sauer-kraut 
tastes  good  in  Germany,  and  it  is  notorious  that 
the  bagpipes  sound  quite  reasonable  in  Scotland. 
In  the  same  way,  there  is  no  form  of  hat  yet 
devised  by  human  ingenuity  that  will  not  tempt 
forgiveness  when  it  is  on  the  right  woman. 

And  woman  herself  quite  clearly  perceives  the 
force  of  association,  the  importance,  if  the  signifi- 
cance of  the  hat  is  to  be  preserved  and  understood, 
of  keeping  it  on  her  head.  If  this  were  not 
so  why  should  we  be  confronted  with  the  monu- 
mental paradox  that  our  womankind  are  keeping 
their  hats  on  in  church  and  taking  them  off"  in 
places  of  amusement  ?  At  the  theatre  woman  con- 
sents to  be  separated  from  her  hat,  and  to  have  her 
hat  separated  from  her.  At  her  devotions  she  is 
not  yet  willing  to  commit  this  discord,  and  in  the 
dim  religious  light  it  twinkles  and  shimmers  its 
owner's  insistent  dictum  :  The  hat  is  the  woman. 
In  a  thousand  ways  the  hat  declares  the  existence  of 
occult  meanings.  A  woman  who  would  cut  a  man 
who  wore  a  made  tie,  who  would  not  buy  a  repro- 
duced antique  or  pirated  print,  who  knows  Sevres 
at  a  hundred  yards  and  a  real  Bokhara  in  the  dark, 
will  cover  her  head  with  linen  lilies  and  cotton- 
bloated  roses.    A  woman  who  would  hesitate  to 

132 


Lace  and  Destiny 

put  a  jewel  in  her  hair,  will  heap  upon  the  dyed 
straw  of  her  hat  festoons  of  glass  and  steel  and 
wax,  with  the  fretted  carcass  of  a  bird. 

After  all,  there  is  no  occasion  to  take  hats  seri- 
ously, unless  you  happen  to  sit  behind  one,  which, 
of  course,  cannot  always  be  happening.  They  are 
a  wonderful  study ;  there  are  so  many  different 
kinds  ;  they  have  been  talked  about  so  much,  and 
have  filled  so  large  a  place  in  our  lives,  especially  in 
public  audiences.  They  have  been  discussed  as 
widely  and  as  fervidly  as  the  Federal  Constitution. 
Because  of  them,  men  have  passed  laws  and  sleep- 
less nights.  Because  of  them  men  fought  duels  in 
the  last  century  and  lawsuits  in  this.  To  make  it 
possible  to  have  them  more  refulgent  and  fetching, 
husbands  and  fathers  have  worked  on  Sundays  and 
stopped  smoking.  Though  it  has  been  assailed 
with  fanatical  bitterness,  buffeted  by  satire,  stripped 
by  statute,  stoned  by  envy,  disciplined  by  reform, 
the  hat  serenely  survives,  a  defiant  catalogue  of 
every  trait  for  which  it  ever  has  been  either  praised 
or  condemned.  From  out  the  din  of  conflict  and 
discussion  it  rises  unscathed  and  unashamed  the 
proud  emblem  of  woman's  pictorial  supremacy, 
which  all  nature  has  said  must  and  shall  be 
preserved. 

And  you  know  what  she  can  do  with  a  veil ;  she 
can  make  you  forget  that  a  veil  is  barbarous  ;  she  can 
make  you  forget  that  you  should  n't  like  veils,  —  she 
can  make  you  like  her  in  one.  She  can  make  it  in- 
crease her  effect  of  preciousness,  if  that  effect  is  in 

'33 


Miss  America 


her  line  ;  or  make  it  increase  her  sphinx-like  effect, 
if  that  happens  to  be  in  her  line.  She  no  longer  is 
extravagant  in  contriving  them.  Sarah's  was  to  cost 
a  thousand  pieces  of  silver.  She  now  is  content  to 
make  it  a  direct  and  specific  instrument  of  illusion. 

If  the  late  Mr.  Darwin 
had  given  serious  attention 
to  veils  he  would  have  re- 
marked that  the  wearing  of 
them  has  developed  new  ex- 
pressions of  countenance 
among  women.  When  they 
wrinkle, —  I  mean  the  veils, 
—  the  wearer  has  away  of 
pursing  her  lips  to  push  the 
silken  gauze  free  from  the 
end  of  her  nose,  having  ac- 
complished which,  her  fin- 
gers gently  pull  the  thing 
into  subjection  from  the 
lower  hem.  At  certain  sea- 
sons and  under  certain  con- 
ditions the  habit  is  strangely  general,  until  you 
might  think  that  woman,  like  the  novelist  in  his 
last  chapter,  is  always  drawing  a  veil.  The  more 
expert  can  pull  out  the  wrinkles  by  supplementing 
the  pout  of  the  lips  with  an  indescribable  wrinkling 
of  the  nose,  and  without  calling  assistance  from  the 
hand.  I  do  not  suppose  that  girls  are  educated  to 
do  this  in  any  particular  way,  yet  the  uniformity  of 
the  habit  is  little  less  than  astonishing. 

•3  + 


Lace  and  Destiny 

Speaking  of  uniformity  of  habit,  I  have  observed 
the  same  thing  about  her  back  hair.  The  gesture 
of  the  fingers  with  which  a  woman  readjusts  a  hair- 
pin, or,  perhaps,  simply  ascertains  that  it  is  doing 
its  duty,  is  wonderfully  similar  among  all  women. 
Yet  the  gesture  may  to  a  singular  degree  be  a  reflec- 
tion of  her  per- 
sonal style,  and 
in  that  latitude  for 
purely  personal 
grace  you  some- 
times are  brought 
to  the  compensa- 
tory fact  that  in 
sitting  behind  the 
hat  you  also  are 
sitting  behind  the 
hairpins. 

This  crowning 
glory  of  her  hair  ! 
How  it  has  flut- 
tered in  song  and 
story!  How  it 
has  shimmered  here  in  comedy  and  there  in  tra- 
gedy !  How  it  has  dowered  and  decked  and  framed 
her,  and  puzzled  us  by  its  mysterious  fickleness  of 
color,  now  this  shade,  now  that,  on  the  same  saucy, 
shapely  head  !  How  quaint  a  picture  she  can  make 
for  us  when  she  masks  it  in  powder  and  carries  us 
back  to  the  days  of  Copley  or  Watteau  !  How  it 
has  served  to  remind  us,  in  some  forbidden  dis- 

'35 


Miss  America 


covery  of  the  crimping  pin  or  the  curl-paper,  that 
from  the  beginning  woman's  pleasures  and  her  con- 
quests have  not  been  unmixed  with  pain  ! 

How  much  fashion  owes  to  hair  and  hair  to  fash- 
ion !  How  inexhaustible  are  the  harmonies  of  line 
of  which  it  is  capable!  How  fascinating,  by  asso- 
ciation, are  the 
combs,  and  patil- 
las  and  wimples 
and  ferronieres 
which  have  ca- 
ressed and  curbed 
it !  We  no  longer 
dye  it  blue  as 
the  Greeks  did, 
though  we  still, 
as  the  Greeks 
did  also,  produce 
blondes  at  pleas- 
ure. Far  be  it 
from  this  page 
to  express  any 
preference  as  between  blonde  and  brunette.  If,  as 
we  have  been  told,  all  of  the  poets  from  Homer  to 
Apuleius  doted  on  blonde  hair ;  if  Aphrodite  was 
blonde,  and  Milton's  Eve;  if  Petrarch  loved  his 
blonde  Laura  (with  crimps)  and  Boccaccio  delighted 
in  tresses  of  gold,  who  shall  attach  any  more  final 
significance  to  this  than  to  the  fact  that  woman  at 
his  moment  is  whimsically  dressing  her  hair  like 
Botticelli's  Grace? 

136 


Lace  and  Destiny 


Reason  does  not  meet  these  matters.  "  I  am 
highly  pleased,  "  wrote  Addison,  "  with  the  coiffure 
now  in  fashion."  That  is  the  ideal  attitude  of 
mind,  a  point  of  view  above  reproach.  No  man 
really  is  normal  who  does  not  think  that  "  the  coif- 
fure now  in  fashion,"  yes,  and  all  else  in  fashion 
that  expresses  the  invincible  instinct  of  woman,  is 
peculiarly  and  especially  likable. 

"  Professor  !  "  I  cried,  in  a  moment  of  fresh  and 
profound  conviction,  "  I  am  assured  that  it  is  a 
measure  of  sanity  in  a  man  that  he  shall  like  woman 
in  whatever  she  wears.  She  can  confound  our 
most  precious  theories  by  doing  as  she  pleases  in 
the  matter  of  dress,  for  the  effect  is  always  right 
because  she  has  produced  it.  It  all  is  her.  You 
might  as  well  find  fault  with  the  shade  of  crimson 
in  the  feathers  on  the  bosom  of  a  robin  as  to  find 
fault  with  the  color  of  her  hat  or  gloves.  Some 
combinations  make  us  wince  when  we  first  see  them, 
and  in  the  weakness  of  that  moment  we  even  may 
entertain  a  doubt  as  to  the  safety  of  the  proprie- 
ties ;  but  we  come  to  excuse  the  doubted  effects, 
and  end  by  putting  them  into  the  very  grammar  of 
color.  I  have  detected  a  score  of  instances  in  which 
woman,  or  fashion  speaking  for  her,  has  met  and 
turned  the  judgment  of  art.  I  have  a  theory  that 
certain  painter  prejudices  have  simply  been  demol- 
ished by  the  instinct  of  woman." 

The  Professor  was  reading  an  exciting  book  on 
"  The  Evolution  of  the  Vertebrata,"  and  I  knew  it, 
but  she  was  quite  patient,  and  said  quietly,  "  Those 

'37 


Miss  America 


are  not  the  only  prejudices  that  have  been  demol- 
ished by  the  instinct  of  woman." 

"True,"  I  admitted,  curious,  yet  not  disposed  to 
challenge  enumeration.  "  Do  you  know,"  I  went 
on,  "  that  your  comment  brings  up  an  interesting 
question  as  to  the  effect  upon  woman  herself  of  a 
pampered  instinct.  Will  not  the  reckless  gratifica- 
tion of  instinct,  charming  as  its  effects  may  be,  tend 
in  time  to  differentiate  her  unfavorably  ?  Though 
you  meet  vertebrata  with  your  reason,  when  you 
turn  your  instincts  loose  upon  millinery  are  you 
not  vitiating —  " 

"  Will  you  stop  !  "  expostulated  the  Professor, 
"  before  both  instinct  and  reason  co-operate  in  box- 
ing your  ears  ?  Prattle  about  a  woman's  instinct  is 
a  man's  way  of  dodging  admission  of  woman's 
subtler  sense.  If  I  actually  had  the  time  I  should 
like  to  impress  upon  you  the  fact  that  dress  is  a  de- 
partment of  the  fine  arts;  that  it  has  a  logic  and  a 
language,  priniciples,  rules,  functions,  and  a  future. 
But  that  is  another  matter.  Man  is  hampered  by 
absurd  prejudices  as  to  clothes,  especially  as  to  the 
clothes  of  women.  Our  Concord  philosopher  re- 
marked that  the  consciousness  of  being  well  dressed 
imparts  a  peace  and  confidence  which  even  religion 
scarcely  can  bestow.  Beneath  the  fact  of  this  de- 
pendence lie  emotions  and  impulses  to  which  women 
yield  frankly,  but  to  which  men  turn  a  hypocritical 
squint.  The  candor  of  woman  toward  her  clothes 
instincts  does  her  good.  A  free,  natural  love  of 
clothes  as  clothes  is  a  sign  of  health  in  a  woman." 

138 


Lace  and  Destiny 


"  Professor,  if  I  did  not  know  how  fearfully  and 
wonderfully  it  was  made,  and  how  unpromising  for 
the  purpose,  I  should  say  that  you  were  talking 
through  your  hat." 

The  Professor  rewarded  me  with  her  choicest 
twinkle.  "Well,"  she  said,  "  I  shan't  be  able  to 
laugh  in  my  sleeve  much  longer;  fashion  is  making 
it  tighter  every  day  !  " 

"  Can  you  not  see,"  I  went  on,  "  that  the  tight- 
ness or  looseness  of  a  sleeve,  for  example,  must 
have  some  direct  effect  upon  the  mental  attitude  of 
a  woman  ?  Are  not  these  constant  changes  de- 
structive of  intellectual  repose  and  progress  ?  If 
dress  is  a  language,  how  can  you  escape  a  resulting 
confusion  in  this  instability  ?  " 

"  My  dear  sir,  that  constant  change  of  which  you 
speak  is  not  an  instability,  but  a  consistent  and 
symmetrical  ebb  and  flow." 

"  It  may  be  pure  curiosity,  Professor,  but  even  if 
Rosalind  did  not  have  '  a  doublet  and  hose  in  her 
disposition,'  it  seems  to  me  that  we  well  may  wonder 
how  far  the  current  bloomer  affects  the  mind  of  the 
current  young  woman.  It  cannot  be  possible  that 
so  momentous  and  revolutionary  a  condition  as  the 
bloomer  shall  be  without  effect  upon  the  mind  of 
woman  —  and  not  merely  upon  the  women  who  wear 
them,  but  upon  the  whole  sex.  It  has  been  said  that 
not  only  the  physical  structure  but  the  character 
of  men  have  been  modified  by  the  fact  that  men 
persistently  avoid  bagging  their  trousers  at  the 
knees.  Will  not  the  divided  skirt  divide  woman's 
attention  —  "  i  +  i 


Miss  America 


"As  for  bloomers,"  said  the  Professor,  "and  all 
related  forms  of  dual  garmentature,  I  am  going  to 
lecture  about  them  before  the  Zenith  Club,  and,  if 
you  are  very  good,  when  my  paper  is  quite  com- 
pleted I  shall  read  it  to  you.  Meanwhile,  I  may 
remark  that  the  bloomer  is  not  'current'  at  all, 
save,  perhaps,  in  a  modified  and  semi-visible  way 
in  partnership  with  an  abbreviated  skirt,  —  but  this 
is  anticipating." 


142 


VII 


CHANCE  AND  CHOICE 


A 


DISTINGUISHED  general 
and  admirable  gentleman  once 


mm 

was  said  to  have  lost  the  Presidency 
Ifefl  because  he  called  the  tariff  a  "  local 
Y  N^  issue."     It  might  be  difficult  for  us 

*s>^j  to  discipline   Coleridge   for  calling 

love  a  "  local  anguish."  Yet  the 
plausibility  of  the  statement  should  not  defend 
the  culprit.  Love  is,  actually,  not  at  all  local, 
particularly  when  it  is  an  anguish.  It  is  immensely 
pervasive,  an  international  issue,  an  inter-planetary, 
a  universal  issue.  The  light  of  love  may  be  hidden 
under  the  bushel  of  modesty,  yet  its  undaunted 
X-rays  will  penetrate  the  farthermost  spaces. 

But  it  is  too  late,  or  too  early,  in  other  words 
wholly  unfashionable,  to  write  about  love,  and  I 
certainly  should  not  have  committed  the  offence  of 
the  foregoing  paragraph  had  it  not  been  for  an 
entirely  orderly  and  even  timely  thought  as  to  the 
possibility  that  love,  like  any  other  malady  or 
manifestation,  might  have  a  purely  national  flavor, 
not  merely  in  its  outward  symptoms,  but  in  its 

'43 


Miss  America 


inherent  quality.  That  is  to  say,  I  had  wondered 
in  what  way,  if  in  any  way,  the  American  girl's 
definition  of  love  would  be  distinctive.  If  I  had 
asked  the  Professor,  she  would,  had  she  consented 
to  take  me  seriously,  have  described  love  as  "the 
sum  and  sublimation  of  all  possible  inter-human 
attachments,"  or  something  of  that  sort.  She 
would  have  been  abstract,  for  woman,  however 
personal  she  may  incline  to  be  by  virtue  of  her  sex 
and  method,  loves  the  abstract  in  definition  for  so 
much  of  reservation  as  it  may  leave  to  her.  There 
is  safety  and  breathing  room  in  a  large  definition. 
Doubtless  we  never  shall  be  able  to  get  at  Miss 
America's  sentiments  except  in  a  purely  empirical 
way,  and  if  I  were  writing  a  treatise  instead  of 
setting  down  a  few  notes,  I  should  have  felt  an 
obligation  to  study  out  the  question  by  observing 
critically  the  conduct  of  the  American  girl  in  the 
processes  of  courtship. 

The  difficulty  of  such  observation  always  must 
lie  in  the  fact  that  the  most  interested  man  in  any 
specific  instance  himself  is  wholly  incapable  of  mak- 
ing report  if  he  would.  A  man  who  could  be 
analytical  in  any  circumstances  which  included  a 
settlement  of  his  own  fate,  would  be  fit  for  every 
treason.  He  might  go  through  a  variety  of  mental 
motions  which  to  him,  at  the  time,  passed  for  the 
convolutions  of  pure  reason.  He  might,  and  doubt- 
less often  has,  fancied  himself  as  studying  her,  as 
penetrating  the  mask  of  her  femininity,  as  dispas- 
sionately dissecting  her  sentiments.     Indeed,  every 

144 


Chance  and  Choice 


prudent  man  must  at  some  stage  weigh,  with  what- 
ever sobriety  may  be  possible  to  him,  the  chances 
of  what  she  will  say ;  and  this  must  always  include 
some  estimate  of  what  she  is  thinking. 

The  relationship  between  what  she  is  thinking 
and  what  she  will  say  is  one  of  the  most  complex  in 
nature,  and  I  fancy  that  in  our  climate  and  environ- 
ment its  fundamental  complexity  has  been  increased. 
I  know  that  it  is  the  habit  of  science  to  assume  that 
the  reason  woman  seems  more  contradictory  than 
man  is  not  that  she  is  dishonest,  but  that  she  is  im- 
pulsive. Impulse  naturally  is  far  less  uniform  than 
reason.  "They  change  their  opinions,"  complains 
Heine,  "as  often  as  they  change  their  dress,"  a 
sentiment  which  proves  conclusively  that  Heine  had 
credulous  intervals.  A  woman  who  always  had  the 
same  opinion  would  instinctively  realize  the  stupid- 
ity of  that  condition,  as  she  would  the  condition  of 
always  being  seen  in  the  same  dress ;  and  if  she 
did  n't  have  a  new  opinion  she  might  do  with  the 
old  opinion  as  with  the  old  dress,  turn  or  cut  it  over. 
You  cannot  say  from  the  notorious  inaccuracv  of  a 
woman's  gesture  when  she  presumes  to  place  her 
hand  on  her  heart,  that  she  has  not  a  heart,  that  she 
is  unaware  of  its  precise  location,  or  that  it  is  not  in 
the  right  place. 

If  a  man  means  less  than  he  says,  and  9  woman 
always  means  more,  we  may  see  at  a  glance  that  it  is 
easier  to  subtract  than  to  add.  But  this  is  not  the 
chief  difficulty.  A  man,  if  I  may  be  pardoned  the 
dogmatism,  always  speaks  in  the  original,  while 
io  i+5 


Miss  America 


woman  must  be  translated,  and  it  is  vastly  easier  in 
any  case,  to  translate  his  hyperbole  than  her  meiosis. 
When  woman  was  simpler,  she  had  less  of  this 
quality.  When  she  said  no,  and  simply  meant  yes, 
man  learned  to  translate  and  understand  her.  Even 
a  man  could  work  out  by  the  least  subtle  of  reason- 
ing that  when  she  said  "  No  !  "  most  fiercely  she 
really  was  saying,  "Idiot!  why  don't  you  make  me 
say  yes  !  "  But  after  a  time,  perhaps  because  she 
suspected,  for  good  reason,  man's  discovery  of  the 
cypher,  because  she  saw  that  it  was  not  enough  to 
turn  the  alphabet  upside  down,  woman  began  to 
qualify  rather  than  to  invert,  and  man  was  no 
longer  in  possession  of  the  key.  The  whole  arith- 
metic of  the  calculation  was  infinitely  lifted,  and 
rose  from  the  rule  of  three  into  the  higher  realms  of 
pure  mathematics.  If  she  always  called  him  back 
he  would  know  just  what  to  do.  If  a  little  absence 
always  made  her  heart  grow  fonder,  the  process  was 
capable  of  exact  and  circumstantial  procedure.  But 
no  longer  is  it  so.  She  may,  indeed,  still  mean  yes 
when  she  says  no.  She  reserves  her  constitutional 
rights.  But  to  read  her  language  now,  to  filch 
from  her  swift  talk  the  true  meaning,  to  trace  in 
the  deceptively  deep  stream  of  her  feminine  philoso- 
phy the  faintly  shining  pebbles  of  pure  fact,  is  a 
function  calling  out  the  highest  that  is  in  man. 

In  Miss  America,  then,  we  have  this  quality  at  its 
best,  or  its  worst,  as  you  may  view  the  matter  ;  and 
the  quality  in  her  is  coupled  with  others  that  belong 
to  her,  and  perhaps  to  her  only.    The  degree  of 

146 


Chance  and  Choice 


independence  which  she  has  achieved  has  had  a 
natural  effect  upon  her  relations  to  courtship.  This 
independence  has  not  merely  accentuated  the  elu- 
siveness  which  belongs  to  her  as  a  woman.  The 
quality  of  being  hard  to  get  is  not  new  in  woman, 
or  in  any  degree  original  in  any  race.  Ranging 
from  the  conditions  in  which  barbaric  woman  is 
knocked  down  by  the  strongest  bidder,  to  those  in 
which  she  is  knocked  down  to  the  highest,  there  is 
a  uniform,  because  instinctive,  outward  habit  of  in- 
difference or  aloofness  in  the  sex.  But  Miss 
America's  independence  affects  the  whole  question 
of  her  choice  and  the  method  of  her  choice.  And, 
committed  as  she  is,  by  virtue  of  being  a  woman,  to 
a  vast  and  fateful  chance,  she  has,  more  certainly 
than  any  other  woman  in  the  world,  a  choice.  For 
good  or  ill,  and  in  whatever  degree  social  station 
and  social  habit  may  modify  the  practice,  she  has  an 
actual  participation  in  the  forming  of  the  matrimo- 
nial partnership.  The  world  has  seen  marriage  by 
capture,  by  service,  by  purchase,  by  social  conven- 
ience, by  free  and  natural  choice.  The  experiment 
of  marriage  by  free  choice  has  received  in  our  own 
country  its  fullest  trial.  Marriage  by  social  con- 
venience and  by  purchase  still  survive,  even  with  us, 
and  there  are  many  among  us  who  think  that  mar- 
riage for  love  may  not  be  final  as  a  national  trait, 
and  that  we  will  discover  that  the  compact  of  mar- 
riage, being  in  the  interest  of  society  and  actually 
under  the  government  of  society  should  be  made 
directly  in  conformity  with  the  convenience  of  so- 

149 


Miss  America 


ciety.  Meanwhile,  the  trait  is  under  scrutiny,  the 
practice  is  under  trial. 

Marriage  for  love,  is  marriage  in  which  woman  is 
the  arbiter,  so  that  Miss  America  is  carrying  out, 
side  by  side  with  her  brother's  experiment  in  democ- 
racy, an  extraordinary  and  unprecedented  experiment 

in  social  practice. 
She  believes,  and 
reasonably,  that 
Plato  prophesied 
this  system  in  his 
conservativ  e  1  y 
worded  remark 
that  "people 
must  be  acquaint- 
ed with  those  into 
whose  families  and 
with  whom  they 
marry  and  are 
given  in  mar- 
riage." She  be- 
lieves that  if  mar- 
riage is  to  be 
"  chiefly  by  acci- 
dent and  the  grace  of  nature,"  it  shall  be  left  to  her 
to  illustrate  the  grace  of  nature.  And  most  men 
who  are  candid  with  themselves  know  that  while 
man  may  have  the  nominal  initiative,  she  is  in 
charge  of  the  situation.  There  is  a  German  say- 
ing that  a  man  cannot  be  too  careful  in  choosing 
his  parents.     It  is  equally  true  that  a  man  can- 

150 


Chance  and  Choice 

not  be  too  careful  in  letting  the  right  woman  pick 
him  out. 

If  I  have  been  able  to  grasp  it,  the  American 
girl's  idea  is  that  marriage  is  best  when  it  is  a  cul- 


minated friendship,  that  is  to  say,  when  it  includes 
friendship.  This  is  a  new  idea,  of  course,  revolu- 
tionary in  more  than  may  at  first  appear.  Indeed, 
we  might  more  correctly  call  the  American  idea, 
marriage  for  friendship.    Balzac  has  said  a  very 


Miss  America 


severe  thing  of  love  that  does  not  include  "  an 
indissoluble  friendship";  but  it  cannot  be  denied 
that  we  often  are  perplexed  to  see  that  in  this 
business  the  greater  does  not  always  seem  to  be 
including  the  less.  If  the  American  girl  shall  suc- 
ceed in  definitely  incorporating  friendship  into  the 
essentials  of  marriage  she  will  have  accomplished  a 
great  triumph.  "  As  to  the  value  of  other  things," 
says  Cicero,  "  most  men  differ;  concerning  friend- 
ship all  have  the  same  opinion." 

If  she  shall  succeed  in  making  friendship  an 
essential  of  marriage,  Miss  America  will,  indis- 
putably, have  founded  the  American  practice  of  a 
pre-matrimonial  acquaintance.  We  shall  go  on 
believing  that  when  we  meet  her  with  a  "  Fate-can- 
not-harm-me-I-am-engaged "  look,  she  cannot,  as 
often  happens  in  other  civilizations,  be  in  igno- 
rance of  his  name.  And  we  can  see  at  a  glance 
that  by  insisting  that  she  shall  know  the  man  she  is 
to  marry,  Miss  America  is  assuming  an  intimate 
and  personal  dominion  over  courtship.  She  not 
only  is  assuming  a  power  and  a  responsibility,  but 
confessing  the  delicate  truth  of  her  individual  juris- 
diction. It  will  make  no  difference  what  formula 
she  uses  for  "You  may  speak  to  father."  The 
euphemisms  behind  which  she  now  can  hide  herself 
are  as  diaphanous  as  her  finest  veil. 

Yet,  is  there  any  to  doubt  her  mastery  of  the 
situation  she  has  invented?  Is  there  any  to  doubt 
that  in  her  new  situation  she  has  a  new  power  ?  I 
know  what  has  been  said  of  the  women  who  have 

152 


Chance  and  Choice 


gone  before.  "  And  this  I  set  down  as  an  absolute 
truth,"  said  Thackeray,  "  that  a  woman  with  fair 
opportunities  and  without  an  absolute  hump  may 
marry  whom  she  likes."  And  I  do  not  mean,  and 
perhaps  should  specifically  protest  that  I  do  not 
mean,  that  Miss  America  is  a  whit  more  assertive 
in  her  selection  than  the  women  of  whom  Thackeray 
has  chosen  to  say  this  much.  But  there  is  a  sense 
in  which  Miss  America,  by  virtue  not  only  of 
peculiar  privileges,  but  of  peculiar  endowments,  is 
giving  a  new  significance  to  courtship.  Her  atti- 
tude of  mind  is  not  to  be  confused  with  mere  inde- 
pendence. We  have  many  antecedent  examples  of 
independence.  "  At  all  events,"  wrote  Mrs.  Carlyle 
to  her  insistent  suitor,  "  I  will  marry  no  one  else. 
That  is  all  the  promise  I  can  and  will  make."  She 
thought  that  an  agreement  to  marry  a  certain  person 
at  a  certain  time  was  simply  absurd.  Miss  Amer- 
ica's independence  is  the  product  of  conditions 
which  have  produced  a  sex  attitude  of  mind  as  well 
as  an  individual  attitude  of  mind. 

It  has  seemed  as  if  the  development  of  this 
sentiment,  and  the  realization  of  responsibility,  were 
making  the  American  girl  more  conservative  in 
certain  ways,  and  that  she  was,  in  the  matter  of 
early  marriages  for  example,  drawing  nearer  to  the 
older  systems.  Sentimentally,  early  marriages  are 
a  good  thing.  Perhaps  they  are  practically  also. 
Martin  Luther  and  other  wise  commentators  have 
pointedly  advised  them.  But  the  century  has 
scarcely  offered  approval.    Stubbs,  in  his  "  Anatomy 

■53 


Miss  America 


of  Abuses,"  complained  bitterly  that  it  should  be 
possible  for  "  every  sawcy  boy  of  xiiij.,  xvi.,  or  xx 
yeres  of  age  to  catch  a  woman  and  marie  her  with- 
out any  fear  of  God  at  all."  Early  marriages  were 
a  source  of  great  complaint  in  our  colonial  days. 
Probably  the  caution  of  our  young  women  is  re- 
sponsible for  the 
fact,  now  fre- 
quently quoted, 
that  early  mar- 
riages are  less  fre- 
quent.  At  the 
first  sign  of  a  new 
caution  there  is 
always  the  alarm- 
ist who  jumps  to 
the  conclusion 
that  he  is  to  be 
put  off  until  the 
time  De  Ouincey 
set  for  the  amuse- 
ment of  taking 
home  a  printing 
press, — "the  twi- 
light of  his  dotage"  ;  and  it  will  be  said  of  this  or 
that  section  when  some  one  is  in  the  mood  to  say 
it,  as  Heine  said  of  France  in  1837,  that  "  girls  do 
not  fall  in  love  in  this  country." 

Some  characteristics  of  the  era  may  not  be  attri- 
buted to  anything  that  is  new  in  our  system.  Flirta- 
tion, for  example,  is  a  very  old  vice.    Yet,  as  every 

!5  + 


Chance  and  Choice 


calling  has  a  conscience  of  its  own,  I  like  to  think 
that  flirtation  has  been  harshly  painted  in  some 
respects.  If  it  does  not  show  specific  modifications 
in  our  longitudes,  we  must  conclude  that  it  is  a 
necessary  evil.  At  any  rate  we  know  from  more 
than  one  biologist  that  flirting  is  not  solely  a  human 
trait.  This  in  a  measure  disperses  and  softens  the 
responsibility.  And  one  must  not  be  hasty  in 
marking  flirtation.  There  is  the  seeming  and  the 
real,  like  true  and  false  croup.  Many  women  have 
been  accused  of  flirting  who  were  never  more  serious 
in  their  lives,  just  as  we  have  known  them  to  be 
cruelly  accused  of  sincerity  at  a  time  when  their 
whimsicality  should  have  been  patent  to  the  least 
intelligent  of  observers. 

In  an  era  when  letter-writing  is  said  to  be  dying 
out,  it  is  not  surprising  that  love-letters  should 
come  under  suspicion.  Indeed,  there  have  been 
many  temptations  to  cynicism.  The  law  courts  have 
been  invoked  to  decide  whether  love-letters  belong 
to  the  sender  or  to  the  receiver;  nice  questions  have 
grown  out  of  misunderstandings  as  to  proposals 
of  marriage.  It  is  hinted  that  men  are  to  become 
revoltingly  crafty  as  to  things  put  upon  paper,  and 
that  the  young  lady  of  a  not  remote  future  will  re- 
ceive her  lover's  notes  moist  and  blurred  from  the 
embrace  of  a  copying  book. 

The  general  decrease  in  the  quantity  of  letter- 
writing  due,  among  other  reasons,  to  the  telephone, 
the  trolley  and  railroads,  and  the  increased  rapidity 
of  life  in  general,  undoubtedly  has  influenced  the 

'55 


Miss  America 


mere  bulk  of  sentimental  correspondence,  though 
concrete  instances  are  conflicting.  One  young  man 
of  my  acquaintance  writes  to  his  sweetheart  every 
day.  Another,  who  has  been  engaged  for  some 
months,  confessed  to  writing  to  the  young  woman 
(she  lives  in  another  city)  once  a  week  ;  "  and  do 
you  know,"  he  said,  "  I  have  a  deuce  of  a  time  to 
find  anything  to  say  !  " 

Whatever  tendency  the  American  girl  herself 
may  be  willing  to  foster  or  accept,  it  always  will  be 
true  that  the  gift  for  writing  the  right  letter  to  the 
right  person  is  one  of  the  most  potent  known  to 
civilization.  There  are  genuine,  warm-hearted 
charming-mannered  men  who  can  write  only  a 
brutally  dull  letter,  and  there  are  reprobates  who 
can  fill  a  letter  with  the  aroma  of  paradise.  In  an 
affair  beginning  with  letters  the  reprobate  must 
have  the  advantage.  Indeed,  I  knew  a  girl  who 
went  on  believing  in  the  author  of  certain  letters 
after  the  most  disenchanting  honeymoon  that  ever 
woman  endured,  after  society  had  looked  askance 
at  her,  after  the  towering  lie  of  those  letters  had 
cast  a  blighting  shadow  across  her  life. 

One  pretty  and  pleasant  little  woman  in  Ken- 
tucky told  me  that  when  she  was  engaged  she 
sometimes  got  two  letters  a  day.  And  when  we 
were  married  I  missed  those  letters  so  ! "  And 
this  was  indubitably  a  happy  marriage.  I  knew  in 
just  what  sort  of  place  those  letters  would  be  kept, 
and  just  how  they  would  be  tied  up,  and  could 
fancy  just  how  she  would  look  in  the  dim  of  a  rainy 

,56 


Chance  and  Choice 


day  when  she  brought  them  forth  and  spread  them 
out  —  by  the  cradle. 

Who  can  tell  what  passes  in  the  heart  of  a 
woman  ?  Who  can  read  her  as  she  reads  her  letters 
over  there  in  the  corner  of  the  summer  hotel 
verandah  ?  Who  can  say  what  she  is  thinking 
there  in  the  shadow  of  the  birch-tree  picking  oft 
the  petals  ?  "  He  loves  me  —  he  loves  me  not  " 
—  no,  surely  something  more  modern.  What 
could  be  more  piquing  than  that  partnership  — 
nature  and  a  woman?  If  she  chooses  to  take 
another  member  into  the  firm,  that  is  her  affair. 
If  she  has  a  tryst,  who  shall  have  the  meanness  to 
wish  any  more  or  less  than  that  he  may  not  keep 
her  waiting  an  unseemly  time  —  or  that  she  may 
not  have  followed  a  habit  she  has,  and  have  gone 
absently  to  the  wrong  place?  Yet  she  may  have 
chosen  to  walk  alone  and  to  let  the  summer  pass 
and  the  hectic  colors  of  the  dying  season  flaunt 
themselves  in  her  face  without  giving  a  sign.  Who 
can  say  what  passes  in  the  mind  of  a  woman? 
When  she  opens  the  book  of  her  own  heart, 
and  turns  to  the  last  page  first  to  see  how  the 
thing  comes  out,  is  she  not  puzzled  sometimes 
to  find  all  the  print  running  backward  ?  Who 
can  say,  if  a  fairy  came  out  of  the  wood,  what 
manner  of  choice  she  would  ask  of  that  fairy, 
what  fortune  she  would  consider  sweetest,  what 
form  of  man  she  would  ask  for  her  Prince 
Charming?  How  small  the  chance  that  she  knows 
what  she  wants,  or  that  if  she  did  know  she  would 

■59 


Miss  America 

regard  it  as  safe  and  symmetrical  not  to  ask  for  the 
opposite  ? 

In  the  old  romances  the  dead  leaves  crackled, 
and  the  cavalier  of  her  dreams  whispered  the  soft 
right  word  in  her  ear,  and  she  murmured  "  Yes  !  " 
spelling  it  with  two  letters  and  a  capital  N  as  in  the 
present  hour.  Would  the  gallant  of  the  past  be  to 
her  liking  to-day  ?  Would  she 
receive  him  civilly,  or  would 
she  tease  and  taunt  him  in  her 
provoking  modern  way,  abus- 
ing the  qualities  she  liked  in 
him,  sending  him  away  because 
she  did  n't  want  him  to  go, 
telling  him  that  he  should 
never  win  her  because  she  had 
begun  to  fear  that  he  would  ? 

Neither  the  brusqueness  nor 
the  diffidence  of  the  Puritan 
lover  would  be  likely  to  please 
her.  The  Puritan  lover  would 
lack  a  great  many  of  the  quali- 
ties she  now  admires  in  men, 
chief  among  these,  mayhap,  the  quality  of  not  being 
too  solemn.  She  is  far  from  Puritan  severity  herself, 
and  she  would,  I  fear,  see  him  go  with  a  sigh  of  re- 
lief. In  the  quality  of  not  being  too  solemn,  she 
might  find  the  beau  of  Louis  XV I. 's  time  more  to 
her  liking,  though  his  eagerness  to  draw  his  sword 
for  her  would  certainly  make  her  laugh.  She  never 
would  appreciate  the  romance  of  his  dainty  duels. 

1 60 


Chance  and  Choice 


His  pretty  speeches  would  amuse  her  for  a  little 
while,  but  the  man  who  flatters  her  nowadays  must 
be  a  more  expert  artist  to  escape  the  mortal  wound 
of  her  ridicule.  In  a  later  day  compliment  un- 
doubtedly became  more  of  an  art,  and  the  dude  of 
the  Directoire,  whom  you  might  have  found  in  the 
quaint  drawing-rooms  of  old  Boston,  or  Philadelphia, 
or  Georgetown,  as  well  as 
upon  his  native  soil,  was  an 
ingratiating  gallant  in  many 
ways.  He  posed,  because 
Napoleon  was  making  it  the 
fashion  to  pose,  but  he  posed 
well,  and  he  studied  the  best 
methods  of  saying  caressing 
things  without  making  them 
nauseatingly  sweet.  This 
art  of  compliment,  of  not 
saying  the  right  thing  to  the 
wrong  woman,  nor  the  wrong 
thing  to  any  woman,  reached 
an  interesting  point  of  de- 
velopment in  the  contempo- 
raries of  Beau  Brummel.  Possibly  Miss  America 
would  have  liked  a  Beau  Brummel  in  an  artistic 
spirit,  and  Brummel  had,  as  a  spectacle,  many  traits 
of  gracefulness  and  fascination.  Her  elusiveness 
would  have  piqued  him  and  his  not  too  grovelling 
deference  would  have  made  her  think  him  an  en- 
tertaining fellow.  His  dress  was  elegant  without 
effeminacy,  his  hat  was  the  most  extraordinary  yet 
«  1 6 1 


Miss  America 

devised  by  the  ingenuity  of  man  —  which  itself 
should  be  a  bond  of  sympathy.  But  hats  pass 
away,  and  beaux  melt  among  the  hazy  images  in 
the  tapestry  of  time. 

Yet  they  are  always  with  us.  Every  age  has 
blamed  its  beaux  for  wanting  the  true  gallantry  of 

beaux  in  the  past.  We 
all  have  heard  Miss 
America  say,  rather  petu- 
lantly, that  the  days  of 
chivalry  are  gone.  Per- 
haps they  are  ;  perhaps 
our  men  give  too  little 
attention  to  the  graces 
of  life.  But  let  us  hope 
that  the  modern  man  is 
not  always  as  satire 
paints  him,  that  for  the 
little  shams  of  chivalry 
he  has  substituted  some 
real  essence  of  an  even 
deeper  homage. 
And  we  must  not  forget,  in  considering  courtship, 
that  she,  too,  though  she  may  not  have  greatly 
changed  in  fact,  has  produced  an  effect  quite  as 
puzzling  as  the  change  in  man.  One  of  the  Ger- 
man painters,  possibly  under  the  influence  of  Suder- 
mann,  has  shown  the  modern  girl,  assisted,  and 
possibly  instigated  by  Cupid,  paring  hearts  with  a 
knife.  But  this  is  an  old  partnership  —  Cupid  & 
Co.,  Limited.      I  cannot  say  what  sign  the  firm 

162 


Chance  and  Choice 


puts  up  over  the  door  in  Germany.  In  this  coun- 
try it  certainly  should  read :  "  Hearts  extracted 
without  pain." 

Yes,  she  is  cool.  The  caterer's  sign  "  Weddings 
Furnished,"  does  not,  I  fear,  ever  give  her  a  thrill. 
She  asks  no  one  to  furnish  a  wedding  for  her.  She 
seldom  appears  to  be  in  the 
mental  situation  described  by 
the  thought-curers  as  one  of 
"intense  expectancy."  And 
she  is,  it  must  be  frankly  ad- 
mitted, developing  a  keen,  a 
disconcerting,  critical  sense,  an 
inevitable  result  to  be  sure,  yet 
carrying  its  own  bewildering 
effects.  This  is  the  American 
spirit,  the  inquiring  spirit,  the 
tendency  to  insist  upon  the 
re-establishment  of  standards. 
The  American  girl  always  is 
in  the  attitude  of  being  will- 
ing to  admit  the  superiority 
of  man  —  if  he  can  prove  it. 
Here  enters  her  Americanism.  Her  contention 
is  that  you  cannot  transmit  relativity.  She  sum- 
mons science  to  show  that  new  criteria  are  neces- 
sary, and  she  continually  is  calling  man  into  the 
lists  to  defend  his  titles,  to  repeat  his  victories,  or 
surrender  the  trophies. 

If  you  look  at  it  squarely  it  simply  is  iconoclasm, 
a  social  form  of  image-breaking,  the  image  in  this 

•63 


Miss  America 


case  being  traditional  man.  Observe,  however,  that 
woman  does  not  actually  destroy  the  image.  She 

tentatively  takes  it  down 
from  the  pedestal.  Who 
knows  but  that,  having  dusted 
it  off,  she  may,  after  all,  de- 
cide to  put  it  back  on  the 
pedestal  again  ?  Meanwhile, 
man  is  under  scrutiny.  It  is 
a  trying  moment.  It  is  like 
an  examination  in  a  post- 
graduate course.  The  Ameri- 
can girl  is  examining  man  for 
a  new  degree.  And  man  has 
no  choice  but  to  struggle  for 
it.  He  absolutely  is  with- 
out an  alternative.  He  must 
face  the  most  exacting  social 
service  examination  ever  imposed  by  human  caution 
or  sociological  skepticism.  To  meet  the  test  will 
be  to  wear  a  proud  title. 


164 


VIII 


THE  NEW  OLD  MAID 

THE  complacence  of  the 
unmarried  is  regarded 
by  many  as  one  of  the  most 
distressing  spectacles  in  mod- 
ern life.  Perhaps  there  is 
some  resentment  of  this  as 
an  apparent  lack  of  faith,  or 
at  least  of  hope  ;  others  may 
be  inclined  to  add,  of  charity. 
Eliminate  these  from  woman 
and  it  may  be  difficult  to  mend  the  situation  by 
making  her  president  of  a  kindergarten  society. 

It  is  natural  enough  that  the  unmarried  woman 
rather  than  the  unmarried  man  should  be  the  par- 
ticular mark  for  attack.  There  are  obvious  reasons 
why  woman's  resentment  of  the  unmarried  man 
should  be  concealed  or  disguised.  Woman,  outside 
the  resolution  committee  at  a  suffrage  convention, 
cannot  gracefully  seem  to  resent  an  impairment  of 
the  selecting  instinct  in  man.     Even  though  she  were 

165 


Miss  America 


quite  securely  removed  from  the  possibility  of  social 
commiseration  she  always  would  be  in  danger  of 
appearing  to  speak  with  something  less  than  strictly 
abstract  feeling.  She  knows  her  fundamental  limi- 
tations in  the  casting  of  missiles,  and  the  boome- 
rang of  personalities  is  least  to  her  liking.  To  her, 
natural  selection  may  begin  to  wear  the  appearance 
of  a  huge  joke,  an  immense,  fantastic  contradiction. 
"This,"  she  may  say,  "is  natural,  but  it  is  not 
selection."  Under  the  circumstances  who  can 
blame  her  if  she  resort  to  a  paraphrase  of  evolution 
and  bewilder  man  by  an  unnatural  rejection  ? 

Man's  resentment  is  more  vocal,  and  so  often 
does  it  seem  to  be  touched  with  real  asperity  that 
we  well  may  feel  that  he  has  begun  to  contemplate 
the  situation  with  more  than  a  languid  interest.  I 
suppose  there  is  a  fair  question  as  to  who  began  it. 
Gallantry  dictates  that  a  man  should  neither  admit 
nor  declare  that  he  did.  The  excitements  of  scienti- 
fic controversy  doubtless  often  cause  the  masculine 
debater  to  overlook  this  obligation.  Certainly  it 
often  is  beyond  all  dispute  that  the  American  girl 
has  succeeded,  with  or  without  design,  in  affecting 
man  with  a  definite  awe,  and  it  is  claimed  that,  in 
certain  quarters  at  least,  this  awe  has  resulted  in 
making  him  afraid  to  marry  her,  which,  if  it  were 
true,  would  have  to  be  regarded  as  a  calamity  of 
the  profoundest  moment.  To  admit  the  existence 
of  such  a  condition  would  be  deeply  humiliating, 
since  it  must  belittle  both  man  and  woman,  though 
it  should  be  admitted  that  woman  would  appear  to 

1 66 


The  New  Old  Maid 


better  advantage  as  a  creature  that  had  frightened 
man  than  as  one  that  had  ceased  to  attract  him. 

As  I  said  one  day  to  the  Professor,  science  is  not 
treating  us  quite  fairly  in  this  emergency.  "  As  a 
scientific  person,"  I  said  to  the  Professor,  "  you  will 
remember  the  things  science  once  undertook  to  tell 
us  about  the  great  dualities.  '  Witness,'  said 
science,  with  not  a  glimmer  of  insincerity,  '  the 
beautiful  interdependence  of  the  two  lobes  of  the 
cerebrum  !  How  marvellous  is  their  union  !  Each 
individual  in  form  and  function,  yet  working  in  an 
eternal  harmony.  One  cannot  get  along  without 
the  other.  Let  one  side  of  the  brain  be  hurt  and 
the  other  droops  in  sympathetic  inactivity.'  This 
was  lovely.  It  fortified  every  advocate  of  the  fit- 
ness of  marriage.  '  Observe,'  we  could  say  to  the 
skeptic,  '  that  this  duality  proceeds  throughout 
nature.  Interdependence  is  universal,'  and  so 
on.  But  what  happens  ?  Just  as  we  have  this 
impressive  object  lesson  in  good  working  order, 
along  comes  science,  with  a  frown  and  a  cough,  to 
remark  that  it  was  mistaken  in  the  matter  of  that 
absolute  interdependence  theory,  that  the  brain  lobes 
can,  after  all,  each  get  along  quite  well  at  times  with- 
out the  other;  that  the  injury  or  decay  of  one  is, 
indeed,  sometimes  followed  by  a  steady  increase  in 
the  powers  of  the  other,  one  taking  up  the  functions 
lost  or  dropped  by  the  other.  Nor  was  this  the 
worst  thing  that  happened.  You  know  well  enough 
what  they  used  to  say  about  the  marriage  of  the 
two  lobes  of  the  cerebrum  by  the  corpus  callosum. 

167 


Miss  America 


The  corpus  callosum  at  least  seemed  secure.  We 
could  have  worried  along  with  the  corpus  callosum. 
We  always  could  say :  the  lobes  are  highly  inde- 
pendent in  action,  but  they  are  firmly  married  by 
this  wonderful  ligament  —  if  it  is  a  ligament.  Even 
this  comfort  is  now  taken  from  us.  Science  has 
just  rudely  snatched  away  the  corpus  callosum. 
'  The  two  lobes  can  get  along  without  it,'  grunts 
science.  '  People  have  lived  for  years  with  no 
impairment  of  their  brain  power  with  a  totally 
shrivelled  corpus  callosum.'  It  is  hard  to  keep  pace 
with  these  cynicisms  of  science." 

"You  simply  have  been  punishing  yourself  for 
whimsical  analogies,"  remarked  the  Professor  dryly. 
"  Moreover,  you  are  quoting  abnormalities." 

"Alas,  Professor!"  I  cried,  "it  makes  little 
difference  about  the  abnormality.  Admit  an  excep- 
tion and  the  law  is  dead.  We  could  conjure  with 
the  law.  What  can  we  hope  to  do  now  ?  The 
American  girl  dotes  on  exceptions  —  especially  on 
illustrating  them." 

"  You  must  remember,"  said  the  Professor,  her 
eyes  glowing  solemnly,  and  with  the  tone  of  being 
consciously  judicial  and  at  a  great  altitude,  "  you 
must  remember  certain  facts  about  the  selecting  — 
the  pairing  —  instinct.  Now,  in  the  case  of  man 
it  is  necessary  that  the  selecting  instinct  be  special 
and  not  general.  So  long  as  a  man  permits  himself 
to  think  of  woman  as  an  abstraction,  continues  to 
admire  ideals  of  womanhood  and  does  not  seek  or 
is  not  drawn  to  seek  charms  in  a  particular  woman, 

168 


The  New  Old  Maid 


he  is  likely  to  remain  a  bachelor.  His  instinct  must 
be,  and  has  become  by  centuries  of  custom,  an  in- 
stinct for  specific  selection.  On  the  other  hand, 
the  instinct  of  specific  selection  so  favorable  to 
the  man,  is  distinctly  unfavorable  to  the  woman 
—  that  is  to  say,  unfavorable  to  the  woman  if 
we  accept  marriage  as  her  natural  destination.  A 
woman  who  grows  up  with  the  habit  of  mind  which 
predisposes  her  to  search  for  a  particular  man,  is 
likely  to  remain  unmarried.  To  favor  pairing  in 
her  case,  the  instinct  toward  marriage  must  be  gen- 
eral rather  than  specific.  A  woman  does  not  select 
a  mate  from  all  the  men  in  the  world,  as  a  man  is 
supposed  to  select  a  mate  from  all  the  women  in 
the  world.  She  selects  from  among  those  who  ask 
her,  or,  at  most,  from  the  group  which  she  may  have 
attracted  into  debatable  ground." 
"But  —  "  I  interposed. 

"  Wait  a  moment,"  pursued  the  Professor  firmly. 
"  This  is  not  to  say  that  a  woman  has  no  actual 
right  to  a  privilege  of  selecting  quite  as  definite  as 
that  permitted  to  man.  It  simply  is  saying  that 
under  present  customs  an  effort  toward  specific- 
selection  on  her  part  is  not  favorable  to  marriage. 
There  may,  and  probably  will,  come  a  time  when 
custom  will  permit  to  woman  a  more  specific  selec- 
tion, without  hazard  as  to  the  chance  of  marriage, 
and  without  loss  of  status  on  her  part  in  any  result- 
ing marriage." 

"I  am  glad,"  I  said,  "that  you  have  touched 
that  point,  for  of  course  woman  could  not  afford  to 

171 


Miss  America 


be  specific  at  the  loss  of  prestige.  It  seems  to  me 
that  the  present  system  gives  an  immense  advantage 
to  women,  since,  in  any  matrimonial  emergency  she 
may  always  retort, '  Nobody  asked  you,  sir.'  Man's 
initiative  gives  her  the  benefit  of  the  doubt  in  all 
after  judgments  from  the  world  ;  for  if  man  selects 
her,  and  she  accepts  him  or  yields  to  his  selection, 
and  there  should  possibly  be  error,  plainly,  as  with 
Mark  Twain's  mistaken  lynchers,  the  joke  is  on 
him.  She  cannot  escape  responsibility,  but  her 
responsibility  always  is  lesser,  and  all  the  privileges 
of  reservation  are  on  her  side." 

"  My  personal  opinion,"  observed  the  Professor 
(I  always  accept  this  form  of  approach  as  a  great 
concession),  "  is  that  she  loses  more  than  she  gains 
by  these  conditions.  It  is  generally  believed  that 
during  the  past  century,  particularly  during  the 
past  half-century,  woman,  and  especially  the  Amer- 
ican woman,  has  been  selecting  more  definitely  than 
at  any  previous  time  in  the  history  of  civilized 
society.  One  result  of  the  habit  of  a  more  specific 
selection  on  the  part  of  woman  is  a  decrease  in  the 
number  of  early  marriages  among  women  in  circles 
or  classes  where  these  ideas  prevail,  and  a  general 
increase  in  the  whole  number  of  unmarried  women. 
It  may  be  that  a  further  development  of  this  in- 
stinct will  still  further  decrease  the  proportion  of 
the  unmarried,  unless  custom  shall  so  far  modify 
the  arrangement  of  marriages  that  women  may  more 
equally  participate  in  the  selection  without,  as  at 
present,  exciting  the  antipathy  of  society,  or,  as  you 

172 


The  New  Old  Maid 

have  suggested,  destroying  her  prestige  under  the 
partnership.  There  is,  of  course,  no  final  reason 
why  matrimonial  partnerships  should  not  be  ar- 
ranged upon  a  basis  of  as  perfect  equality  as  any 


j 


other  partnership.  It  simply  is  a  question  of 
instinct  on  the  one  hand  and  expediency  on  the 
other." 

I  quote  the  Professor's  opinions  here  with  es- 
pecial gratification,  since  in  this  instance  they  seem 

i73 


Miss  America 


triumphantly  free  from  sex  bias,  — a  freedom  which, 
indeed,  is  a  growing  trait  with  women.  And  there 
is  something  not  always  comfortable  in  the  sign. 
Is  the  time  coming  when  we  no  longer  can  say, 
"Just  like  a  woman"? 

Perhaps  we  may  discover  that  sentiment  has 
more  to  do  with  the  case  than  has  been  supposed. 
If  the  progress  of  education  has  menaced  sentiment, 
who  shall  say  that  the  greatest  of  sentiments  may 
not  be  the  first  to  suffer  ?  Nothing  is  truer  than 
that  all  women  are  not  equally  capable  of  sentiment. 
Some  women  seem  to  like  the  symbol  of  an  emo- 
tion quite  as  well  as  if  it  were  the  genuine  article. 
To  them  the  innocuous  make-believe  of  love  is  quite 
as  satisfactory  as  the  real  thing.  They  play  with  a 
great  sentiment  as  they  used  to  play  with  their 
dolls,  which  gave  much  less  trouble  than  real 
children  and  furnished  just  as  much  sentimental 
excitement  as  if  they  actually  had  been  alive.  I 
suppose  this  is  particularly  true  of  imaginative 
women,  who  know  how  to  drape  their  souls  in 
nun's  garb  and  let  their  fancy  play  the  devil. 
Their  character  is  illustrated  by  the  modern  fashion 
which  permits  them  to  wear  gowns  sombre  to  super- 
ficial observation,  but  which,  you  may  have  the 
opportunity  to  discover,  possess  a  riotously  crimson 
lining. 

What  is  to  happen  to  the  world  if  women  are 
to  acquire  a  fondness  for  the  mere  symbols  ot 
sex,  if  femininity  is  to  become  disembodied,  is 
a   vast  and  vital  question   which  prudence  well 

i74 


The  New  Old  Maid 


might  refer  to  one  of  their  own  eager  and  tireless 
committees. 

The  other  day  I  boldly  put  the  thing  to  the 
Professor.  "What,"  I  asked,  "  is  going  to  happen 
to  the  world  if  the  number  of  old  maids  keeps  on 
increasing  ?  " 

"  Well,"  mused  rather  than  replied  the  Professor, 
"  the  present  rate  of  increase  in  the  number  of 
old  maids  — " 

"  By  which,"  I  said,  "  I  assume  that  you  mean 
hopelessly  unmarried  women." 

"  I  do  not  like  that  word,"  retorted  the  Pro- 
fessor, a  little  sharply,  "  it  makes  me  think  of 
hopelessly  insane.  I  should  prefer  to  say  affirma- 
tively unmarried  —  the  present  rate  of  increase 
in  the  number  of  affirmatively  unmarried  Ameri- 
can women  might  suggest  at  the  first  glance 
that  something  very  annoying  to  evolution  was 
going  to  happen  by-and-by.  Indeed  the  condi- 
tions might  seem  to  be  positively  detrimental  to 
the  Darwinian  hypothesis." 

"  Not  at  all,"  I  protested,  "  if  you  remember  the 
married  old  maids.  Their  transmitted  instinct  is 
bound  to  count  sooner  or  later." 

"  But  I  have  no  fear  that  anything  absurd  is 
going  to  happen."  (I  adored  the  smile  of  which 
the  Professor  was  guilty  at  this  point.)  "  Nature 
will  work  out  the  scheme.  I  mean  supply  and 
demand." 

"I  hope  you  cannot  mean,"  I  protested,  "that 
the  American  girl  has  deliberately  set  about  creat- 
es 


Miss  America 


ing  a  corner  in  wives  for  the  sake  of  raising  the 
market  —  " 

"  Not  precisely  that,"  returned  the  Professor ; 
"though  in  the  evolution  of  altruism  that  might  not 
be  so  absurd.  But  you  must  see  that  old-maidism 
will  not  flourish  unless  it  advantages  the  race  some- 
how. You  cannot  think  that  a  girl  would  set  about 
being  an  old  maid  for  any  other  reason  than  to 
please  or  profit  herself — " 

"  Unless,"  I  said,  "  it  were  to  get  even." 

"Get  even!"  laughed  the  Professor,  "think  of 
getting  even  by  being  odd  !  No.  The  American 
girl  simply  is  experimenting  in  independence.  If 
it  pays,  she  will  keep  it  up.  If  it  does  not  pay,  she 
will  revert  to  the  alternative." 

"Yes,"  I  admitted,  "she  always  can  do  that." 

"  And  meanwhile,"  pursued  the  Professor,  "  I 
insist  that  girl-bachelorism  must  not  be  consid- 
ered as  in  any  sense  final.  The  suggestion  that 
woman  can  get  along  without  man  is  an  impeach- 
ment of  his  charm  and  of  her  wisdom.  One  thing 
is  always  to  be  remembered:  a  man  cannot  rea- 
sonably expect  to  conquer  a  woman  by  not  marrying 
her.  If  the  girl  bachelor  does  not  know  what  is 
good  for  her,  if  her  position  is  untenable,  if  she  is 
losing  precious  time,  a  cynical  attitude  in  the  man 
bachelor  does  not  seem  at  all  likely  to  help  the 
matter.  The  presumption  that  the  American  girl 
knows  what  she  is  about  may  be  erroneous,  but  ill 
temper  in  the  opposition  will  simply  fortify  her. 
She  will  smile  and  smile  and  be  a  spinster  still." 

1 76 


The  New  Old  Maid 


A  spinster !  How  oddly  the  word  sounded ! 
How  grotesque  the  contrast  between  the  image 
called  up  by  the  name  and  the  image  that  fills  the 
eye  of  modern  contemplation  !  The  old  maid  of 
tradition  has  become  a  fantastic  figure,  as  fantastic 
as  if  she  had  no  actual  successor  —  which  possibly 
is  the  real  fact,  for  old-maidism  is  not  strictly  a 
social  condition  but  a  state  of  mind.  Nothing 
could  better  demonstrate  this  than  the  prominence 
and  multiplicity  of  married  old  maids.  It  is  a  mere 
truism  to  say  that  old-maidism  is  not  even  restricted 
by  gender.  Who  does  not  know  the  masculine  old 
maid  !  He  is  an  altogether  different  creature  from 
the  normal  bachelor.  Indeed,  he  sometimes  is 
married.  In  this  instance  contemporary  satire  is 
entirely  within  facts;  he  alone  is  the  new  woman. 

It  is  not  always  an  easy  matter  to  estimate  or  to 
define  the  effect  of  the  new-spinsterism  upon  the 
mind  of  the  opposition.  If  we  were  to  judge  from 
certain  acrid  comments,  the  new  state  of  mind  not 
only  is  more  affirmative,  but  is  vastly  more  aggres- 
sive than  the  old.  A  shrill  tenor  note  here  and 
there  complains  that  the  sopranos  are  sounding 
with  an  inelegant  and  disproportionate  vigor.  There 
is  an  ill-concealed  admission  that  man  in  general  is 
still  wholly  unadjusted  to  the  affirmative  attitude  on 
the  part  of  woman.  Man  cannot  open  the  door 
for  her  or  help  her  out  of  the  coach  unless  she  lets 
him  precede  her.  The  whole  structure  of  gallantry 
is  built  upon  her  acquiescence  in  his  leadership, — 
his  giving  upon  her  taking.    If  she  is  to  ignore  the 

179 


Miss  America 


tradition  of  his  leadership  and  goes  forth  upon  her 
own  account,  what  is  to  prevent  the  occasional,  per- 
haps even  the  frequent,  awkwardness  of  her  actual 
leadership  ?  And  when  she  ceases  to  follow  she 
already  has  begun  to  restrain.  So  runs  the  charge. 
You  would  think,  to  hear  some  people  talk,  that  the 
modern  woman  should  be  indicted  for  delaying  the 
males. 

It  is  hard  to  live  down  a  tradition.  Take  the 
tradition  about  the  college  girl,  for  example,  the 
tradition  that  she  is  a  sombre  person,  strenuous,  un- 
lovely, dominated  by  an  ambition  to  subdue  man 
and  emancipate  her  sex  by  sheer  force  of  learning. 
You  can  call  up  a  picture  of  her  at  work,  her  brain 
throbbing  with  great  thoughts,  her  face  seared  by 
study,  greeting  you  with  a  smileless  challenge  to 
talk  to  the  point,  mostly  in  Latin,  and  with  a  decent 
frequency  in  quotations  from  Plato  and  Epictetus. 
This  gruesome  tradition  makes  her  the  pallid, 
gloomy,  absorbed,  spectacled  member  of  the  house- 
hold, with  a  soul  above  clothes,  glorying  in  unfemi- 
nine  incapacities,  shuddering  at  fashion  magazines 
and  peevishly  rebuking  the  frivolities  of  girlhood. 
She  uses  vast  words,  communes  with  literary  gods, 
and  stands  forth  as  a  sort  of  Book  in  Bloomers. 

This,  I  say,  is  the  college  girl  of  tradition,  of  the 
older  comic  papers.  But  what  is  the  simple  fact  ? 
—  no,  I  cannot  say  the  simple  fact,  for  she  is  a  fact 
of  the  most  complex  variety  ;  what,  rather  is  the 
literal,  photographable  truth  ?  Very  different, 
surely  from  the  absurdities  of  satire  ;  in  fact,  simply 

1 80 


The  New  Old  Maid 


the  American  girl,  alive  to  all  of  life,  woman  first 
and  student  afterward,  continually  up  to  the  mis- 
chief of  teasing  the  social  scientist  by  being  lovely 
and  actually  marrying,  college  education  and  all ! 

Yes,  we  are  making  some  new  traditions.  The 
new  old  maid  is  a  charming  perplexity.  The  old 
maids  of  the  past  read  Plato  together  and  established 
Boston  marriages.  They  read  in  Cicero  and  else- 
where that  friendship  is  less  undebatable  than  love. 
The  traditional  old  maid  talked  about  "  the  faded 
fire  of  chivalry."  Like  Walpole  on  his  Paris  jour- 
ney, she  "fell  in  love  with  twenty  things  and  in  hate 
with  forty,"  which  fully  restored  her  equilibrium. 
Yet  she  did  not  "  vow  an  eternal  misery,"  nor  grow 
combative  at  the  thought  that  St.  Chrysostom  found 
woman  to  be  a  natural  temptation,  a  desirable  ca- 
lamity, a  domestic  peril,  a  deadly  fascination  and  a 
painted  ill.  She  acquired  a  beautiful  serenity.  She 
could  read  Schopenhauer's  proposition  to  rid  the 
world  of  old  maids  by  establishing  polygamy,  with- 
out even  an  audible  snort  of  contempt.  She  filled 
her  leisure  by  admonitions  to  younger  girls  as  to 
the  fathomless  hazards  of  credulity.  She  was  se- 
curely and  splendidly  detached. 

Of  the  new  old  maid,  variously  titled,  it  is,  of 
course,  too  early  to  write.  Whether  she  is  sweeter  or 
the  world  less  sour,  there  certainly  is  less  antipathy 
between  her  and  the  world.  Society  certainly  likes 
her.  She  has  been  discovered  to  be  immensely 
convenient.  She  has  no  asperity.  "  It  is  not," 
she  murmurs  to  man,  "that  I  love  you  less,  but 

.85 


Miss  America 


that  I  love  my  freedom  more,"  for  answer  to  which, 
man  is  sitting  up  o'  nights  in  profound  thought. 
She  does  not  even  claim  that  her  mood  is  perma- 
nent, At  the  first  feeling  of  heart  failure  she  knows 
just  when  to  appoint  a  receiver. 

All  women  can  fool  us  some  of  the  time,  and 
some  women  can  fool  us  all  of  the  time. 


186 


IX 


"AND  SO  THEY  WERE  MARRIED" 

ONE  day  when  the  Pro- 
fessor had  called  a 
bachelor  a  bird  without  feet, 
and  I  had  retorted  that  an 
old  maid  was  a  bird  without 
wings,  the  Professor  re- 
marked significantly :  "the 
old  maid  at  least  settles 
better," and  we  fell  to  talking 
of  settling  as  a  proposition. 
Between  the  predicament 
of  a  bird  who  cannot  fly  and  that  of  a  bird  who 
cannot  alight,  there  might  not  be  much  of  a  choice, 
though  the  Professor  did  her  utmost  to  prove  that 
the  bird  condemned  to  perpetual  flitting  was  in  the 
more  pitiful  situation.  But  it  occurred  to  me  as 
significant  that  the  man  should  dread  to  lose  the 

187 


Miss  America 


privilege  of  flight,  and  the  woman  the  privilege  of 
settling.  I  wondered  if  there  was  anything  more 
in  it  than  the  accident  of  contention. 

We  had  agreed  with  Tolstoi,  that  "  nothing  com- 
plicates the  difficulties  of  life  so  much  as  a  lack  of 
harmony  between  married  people  "  ;  we  had  agreed 
that  much  of  complication  arose  from  a  lack  of  an- 
tecedent harmony  as  to  the  matrimonial  proposition. 

"  Do  you  not  think,  Professor,"  I  asked,  "  that 
much  of  the  trouble  comes  —  that  most  of  the 
trouble  comes  —  from  the  simple  error  of  forgetting 
that  an  institution  cannot  be  better  than  those  who 
represent  or  expound  it  ?  Is  there  not  a  tendency, 
a  very  old  one,  doubtless,  to  expect  that  marriage, 
in  itself,  will  somehow,  transmute  the  participants  ? 
Can  marriage  be  more  of  a  success  than  people,  or 
less  of  a  failure  than  people  ?  Marriage  is  a  bond, 
with  a  benediction,  if  you  like  ;  but  it  is  not  a 
translation.  Surely  we  cannot  take  from  marriage 
more  than  we  carry  to  it — unless  it  might  be  the 
reasonable  and  natural  interest  on  the  combined 
capital." 

Seeing  that  I  was  entirely  serious,  the  Professor 
said  :  "  My  feeling  always  has  been  that  the  chief 
reason  for  the  want  of  success  in  marriage  and  the 
deterrent  spectacle  it  so  often  has  presented,  is  the 
tradition  that  any  legerdemain  of  sentiment  or  rit- 
ual can  make  two  people  one.  Understand  me,  I 
believe  wholly  in  the  ideal  of  a  spiritual  oneness. 
I  have  no  quarrel  with  the  Scriptures  on  that  score. 
But  we  cannot  walk  the  path  toward  a  spiritual 

1 88 


"  And  so  They  were  Married  " 


oneness  with  our  eyes  shut,  by  lying  to  ourselves. 
The  interests  of  two  people  may  be  one  in  the 
highest  sense,  they  may  have  one  aim,  if  they  are 
absolutely  congenial  they  may  have  one  wish;  but 
nothing  conceivable  under  the  sky  ever  can  make 
them  more  or  less  than  two  people.  The  other 
day  some  of  us  were  debating  whether  we  should 
say  '  seven-and-five  is  twelve '  or  '  seven  and  five 
are  twelve.'  They  called  seven  and  five  here  a 
'  singular  concept '  and  some  were  for  is  in  conse- 
quence. But  at  least  man  and  woman  are.  One 
and  one  do  not  make  one,  they  make  two.  In- 
deed, after  marriage,  the  two  are  more  definitely 
two  than  they  were  before.  Personal  sacrifice  pro- 
ceeds in  the  order  of  intimacy.  Society  is  built 
upon  individual  sacrifice.  Friendship  lives  by 
concession,  and  the  intimacy  of  marriage  carries 
to  the  extreme  point  the  idea  of  inter-personal 
compromise,  the  recognition  of  the  personality 
of  another.  To  expect  two  people  to  lose,  with- 
out effort,  by  the  mere  fact  of  marriage,  the  in- 
dividuality which  they  had  before  the  compact,  is 
as  absurd  as  it  would  be  to  take  two  clocks  and 
tie  them  together  with  a  piece  of  pink  string  and 
expect  them  instantly  to  begin  keeping  absolutely 
the  same  time.  What  would  you  find  in  the 
case  of  the  clocks  ?  They  might  be  mated  clocks, 
and  on  opposite  sides  of  the  room  might  pass  for 
two  clocks  keeping  precisely  the  same  time.  But 
when  you  put  them  side  by  side  you  would  dis- 
cover, unless  they  were  supernatural  clocks,  that 

189 


Miss  America 


they  were  running  some  seconds  apart,  and  those 
few  seconds  would  be  as  potent  in  visibly  differ- 
entiating the  clocks  thus  married  as  a  full  minute 
or  more  would  be  on  opposite  sides  of  the  room. 
So  that  when  two  lovers,  who  have  made  elaborate 
concession  to  each  other  before  marriage,  anticipating 
each  other's  desires,  yielding  to  each  other's  preju- 
dices, proceed  after  marriage  to  throw  the  whole 
burden  of  preserving  harmony  upon  some  vaguely 
denned  potentiality  in  the  marriage  relation  itself, 
they  certainly  are  tempting  Providence  into  im- 
patience. It  is  the  lesson  of  sociology  that  man 
must  pay  something  —  yield  something  —  for  the 
companionship  of  the  other  man,  and  the  closer  you 
wish  to  be  to  the  other  man  the  more  you  must 
pay,  the  more  you  must  yield.  When  it  comes  to 
the  companionship  of  the  man  and  the  woman, 
and  when  the  woman  receives  or  demands  equal 
rights  and  privileges,  the  need  of  concession  is 
vastly  complicated,  for  now  the  association  is  not 
only  between  two  persons  but  between  two  sexes  ; 
there  is  both  the  individual  equation  and  the  sex 
equation." 

"  Should  you  not  be  afraid,  Professor,  to  take 
away  this  illusion  ?  Should  we  not  be  striking  a 
further  blow  at  marriage  if  we  withheld  from  those 
about  to  marry  the  hope,  false  though  it  be,  that 
something  beyond  themselves  is  going  to  bestow  its 
benediction  upon  marriage?" 

"  I  cannot  agree,"  protested  the  Professor,  "  that 
any  kind  of  ignorance  can  be  a  good  thing  in 

190 


I 


"  And  so  They  were  Married  " 


the  end.  Moreover,  I  think  this  false  hope,  after 
doing  little  good,  does  a  vast  deal  of  harm.  The 
trouble  comes  when  the  two  who  are  married, 
and  who  have  looked  for  this  magic,  find  it  not, 
find  that  they  still  are  two ;  and  when  they  are 
three,  the  momentous  equation  must  be  carried 
forward." 

I  suggested  that  probably  there  was  no  sex  in 
the  illusion,  that  the  man  and  the  woman  were  alike 
sentimental  in  the  matter. 

"  Probably,"  admitted  the  Professor ;  "  but  as 
woman  suffers  the  more  by  it  we  are  likely  at 
times  to  think  that  her  illusions  must  have  been 
deeper.  I  think  the  American  girl  has  fewer  illu- 
sions than  some  others,  and  I  think  that  somehow 
she  is  going  to  work  out  a  higher  plan  than  the 
world  has  had  the  luck  to  exploit  hitherto." 

"  Let  us  hope  so,"  I  said  fervently. 

The  Professor  turned  quickly  toward  me.  "  Not," 
she  said,  "  that  I  think  that  marriage  has  been, 
relatively,  unsuccessful  with  us.  The  American 
marriage  has  come  nearer,  in  my  opinion,  to  being 
a  happy  marriage  than  any  yet  invented.  The 
very  development  of  the  divorce  system,  monstrous 
as  that  is,  shows  that  nowadays  and  hereabouts 
people  are  beginning  to  insist  that  marriages  must 
be  happy.  Both  before  and  after  marriage  the 
American  girl  is  asking  fair  play." 

"  Fair  play  !  "  It  was  like  the  Professor.  It 
was  the  Anglo-Saxon  of  her.  Fair  play  —  even  in 
marriage.  Applause  to  the  sentiment !  If  Miss 
'3  193 


Miss  America 


America  stands  for  anything,  if  she  personifies  any- 
thing, I  suppose  it  is  social  fair  play.  Sometimes 
woman  seems  to  be  asking  a  great  deal,  like  the 
politicians,  on  the  theory  that  nature  is  a  reform 
administration  and  will  cut  down  the  appropriation. 
But  whatever  we  may  think  of  this,  Miss  America 
certainly  is  showing  the  influence  of  large  conces- 
sions. I  scarcely  think  that  investigation  will  indi- 
cate that  she  is  at  all  sordid.  If  her  personal 
jurisdiction  has  thrown  upon  her  the  need  to  know 
about  a  man's  income,  we  must  not  despise  the 
candor  of  her  investigation.  She  may  not  agree 
with  Perdita  that  "  prosperity  's  the  very  bond  of 
love,"  but  she  has  seen  the  miseries  engendered  in 
marriages  for  money  by  lack  of  love,  and  in  mar- 
riages for  love  by  lack  of  money,  and  she  perceives 
that  money  has  caused  the  trouble  in  either  case. 

If  marriage  is  a  lottery,  we  may  note  that  this  is 
one  of  the  reasons  for  its  popularity.  The  gam- 
bling instinct  is  strong  in  the  human  family,  and  I 
suppose  that  if  marriage  were  a  sure  thing  it  would 
appeal  to  many  with  inferior  force.  It  was  a  pretty 
Texas  girl  who  said  :  "  This  lottery  suggestion  in- 
troduces a  sort  of  sporting  element  into  marriage 
that  makes  it  fascinating.  Marriage  is  the  greatest 
game  of  all."    And  quite  plainly  she  was  no  cynic. 

But  women  are  not  such  good  gamblers  as  men. 
I  fancy  that  is  one  of  the  reasons  why  they  turn  to 
the  last  page  first.  They  do  not  like  uncertainties, 
though  they  can  create  them.  They  will  even 
marry  to  get  at  the  end  of  the  story. 

194 


"  And  so  They  were  Married  " 


It  is  plain  enough  that  Miss  America  is  not  los- 
ing her  sentiment.  She  can  never  lose  her  senti- 
ment while  she  retains  her  superstitions.  I  do  not 
mean  to  say  that  she  countenances  the  cheaper 
superstitions.  When  I  see  a  woman  get  off  a  street 
car  because  it  is  numbered  thirteen,  or  witness  the 
spectacle  of  a  hundred  busy  shoppers,  eager  to  get 
somewhere,  held  at  a  corner  by  an  interminable 
funeral,  because  they  dare  not  cross  between  the 
carriages,  I  accept  that  safe  inference,  dear  to  all 
patriots,  that  the  victims  are  foreign.  In  what  we 
might  call  the  higher  superstitions  she  is  versed  and 
even  proficient. 

Speaking  of  superstitions,  no  better  name  belongs 
to  that  prejudice  by  which  it  sometimes  is  held  that 
Miss  America  is  often  too  tall  to  pair  well,  that  the 
bride  is  not  exemplifying  a  proper  proportion. 
Who  shall  challenge  the  processes  of  evolution  ? 
Who  shall  say  that  in  a  wiser  era  folks  may  not 
like  the  new  proportions  better  ?  Probably  there 
is  no  occasion  to  worry.  In  this  Darwinized  era 
we  cannot  be  persuaded  that  she  very  well  can  get 
to  be  taller  unless  she  wants  to  be,  or  unless  she  is 
preferred  that  way.  If  gallantry  lags,  patriotism 
will  insist  that  the  more  we  see  of  her  the  better  we 
like  her. 

Did  you  ever  see  a  bridal  scrap-book  ?  A  Ten- 
nessee girl,  wedded  a  year,  unfolded  one  for  me,  and 
it  proved  to  be  a  wonderful  affair.  In  the  early 
pages  were  pasted  invitations,  dancing  cards,  con- 
cert and  theatre  programs,  tinfoil   from  bouquets, 

197 


Miss  America 


ribbons  from  gifts,  valentines  and  a  curious  miscel- 
lany of  souvenirs.  Then  came  the  cover  from  the 
box  that  had  held  the  engagement-ring,  a  copy  of 
the  wedding  invitation,  newspaper  comments  on  the 
engagement  and  the  wedding.  Later  pages  held  a 
railroad  map  showing  the  wedding  journey,  Pull- 
man car  vouchers,  express  labels,  hotel  menus, 
miniature  camera  "  views,"  with  much  more  that  I 
cannot  remember.  And  on  a  certain  page  of  this 
scrap  book,  reserved  somehow,  for  the  purpose,  all 
of  the  guests  at  the  wedding  had  written  their 
names.  A  few  months  after  the  wedding  the  hus- 
and  fell  ill,  and  at  the  crisis  his  young  wife  chanced 
to  find  that  the  list  of  names  in  the  book  omitted, 
among  all  of  those  who  were  at  the  wedding,  his 
alone.  She  was  not  superstitious,  but  the  absence 
of  that  name  filled  her  with  a  new  terror.  The 
thing  preyed  upon  her,  and  in  the  still  of  night  she 
slipped  into  the  sick-room  with  book  and  pen,  and 
taking  her  husband's  unconscious  hand,  she  traced 
his  name  there  upon  the  right  page.  He  did  not 
die,  and  when,  one  day,  he  came  upon  the  tremu- 
lous lines  of  that  grotesque  autograph,  he  did  not 
chide  the  forger. 

We  may  have  changed  the  names  of  some  things, 
the  cool  breath  of  realism  may  have  touched  the 
habits  of  our  modern  life,  but  probably  the  heart- 
beat of  sentiment  to-day  is  not  greatly  faster  or 
slower  than  in  the  long  ago.  There  was  a  noble 
tenderness  and  dignity  in  some  of  the  formalities  of 
the  past,  as  when  John  Winthrop  began  his  letter 

198 


"  And  so  They  were  Married  " 

with  :  "  Most  kinde  Ladie,  Your  sweete  lettres 
coming  from  the  abundance  of  your  love  were  joye- 
fully  received  into  the  closet  of  my  best  affections." 


wwi  ■  'mm 

We  do  not  say,  "  My  only  beloved  Spouse,  my 
most  sweet  friend  &  faithful  companion  of  my 
pilgrimage,"  but  let  us  hope  that  nothing  of  the 
intrinsic  beauty  of  love  and  marriage  has  suffered 
any  real  loss. 

199 


Miss  America 


Distrust  those  who  seek  to  show  that  there  is  a 
discordant  note  in  the  old  tune  of  love.  Distrust 
those  who  claim  that  the  old  harmonies  have  been 
superseded,  that  the  new  chords  are  less  sweet  than 
the  old,  that  the  eternal  duet  which  has  tinkled  and 
murmured  down  the  ages  ever  will  be  ended.  The 
strings  and  the  keys  are  new,  but  the  tune  is  the 
old  tune.  All  the  new  notes  and  the  new  titles, 
and  the  new  words  are  but  an  obbligato,  an  ornament 
to  the  love-motive  glowing  like  a  golden  strain  in 
the  majestic  symphony  of  life  —  the  recurring 
melody  always  new,  always  old  ;  always  a  surprise, 
always  as  certain  as  spring  ;  so  conquering  in  its 
power  that  Miss  America,  with  all  of  her  self-reli- 
ance, with  all  of  her  assumed  superiority  to  wizard 
wiles  and  incantations,  falls  under  the  spell  and  has 
no  regret.  She  is  as  willing  as  ever  she  was  to  sit 
at  the  feet  of  the  right  man.  She  knows  her  wo- 
man's power.  She  is  as  willing  as  ever  to  follow  a 
leader.  She  only  asks  that  she  may  elect  her 
leader,  not  with  a  ballot,  but  with  the  benediction 
of  her  love.  She  knows,  with  her  truest  insight, 
that  there  is  no  device  of  science,  nor  ideal  of  senti- 
ment that  ever  has  been  or  ever  can  be  a  substitute 
in  this  world  for  the  love  of  one  man  for  one  woman 
and  of  that  one  woman  for  that  man.  She  sees 
down  the  long  road  of  life,  alternating  patches  of 
sunlight  and  shadow,  chances  of  trial,  certainties  of 
pain,  but  she  sees  no  cowardly  doubt  of  the  nobil- 
ity and  the  triumph  of  her  free  choice.  The  snows 
of  time  will  whiten  her  hair,  and  what  better  fate 

200 


O  »0j0«0«0«0.  0»0»0n  O..O..O  »0»0«  O  .  OoOoO»0  ..o 0 


3 

0 


«) 

0"  O"0"0»0°  O  ■  O'O'O'  O-O-'O"  O"  0"0  ■  O»0"O°O  »0"0 


"  And  so  They  were  Married  " 

can  she  ask  from  the  giver  of  gifts  than  that  she 
may  sit  there,  as  in  the  other  years,  beside  her  re- 
elected leader  in  some  hour  of  peaceful  communion  ; 
to  look  back  on  the  paths  of  their  journey,  and  for- 
ward over  the  long  road,  recalling  the  joys  and  sor- 
rows of  the  pilgrimage,  and  realizing  here  as  at  the 
beginning  that  the  stoutest  defence  against  the  shafts 
of  fate  is  the  divine  aegis  of  love.  .  .  . 

The  Professor  had  come  into  the  room  girded 
for  one  of  her  intermittent  departures  into  the  outer 
world.  I  thought  then,  and  it  has  seemed  to  me 
since,  that  she  never  presented  a  more  agreeable 
spectacle  than  at  that  moment.  She  dawned  so 
radiantly  there  that  I  never  could  remember  what 
she  wore,  save  that  it  was  a  new  gown  with  a  pale 
becoming  pink  somewhere. 

"  Professor,"  I  said,  helpless  before  her  discovery 
of  my  glance,  "  woman  is  the  only  product  of  civili- 
zation which  we  might  praise  to  excess,  if  we  ever 
found  the  words,  without  critical  resentment." 

"You  always  are  either  rampantly  sentimental," 
she  said  over  the  last  button  of  her  glove,  "  or 
remorsefully  satirical." 

"  I  protest,  Professor,  that  now  I  am  neither. 
At  this  instant,  Professor,  you  are  reminding  me 
anew  of  the  infinite  variety  of  woman.  It  may 
be  that  there  is  something  in  the  raiment,  but 
you,  quite  typically,  I  fancy,  burst  upon  me  in 
fresh  phases,  fresh  flavors.    A  man  is  a  mixture 

203 


Miss  America 


to  be  sure,  a  medicine,  if  you  like,  or  a  mixed 
drink.  But  a  woman  is  a  pousse  cafe,  never  twice 
the  same  nectar,  and  one  drains  the  glass  delighted 
and  confused." 

"  I  have  no  means  of  estimating  your  compari- 
son," returned  the  Professor,  "  for  I  never  tasted  a 
pousse  cafe.    I  fancy  it  is  degenerate." 

"  Should  you  ever  test  my  symbolism,  Professor, 
you  will,  I  think,  admit  that  it  is  more  accurate 
than  Thackeray's  comparison  of  a  woman's  heart 
with  a  lithographer's  stone.  '  What  is  once  written 
there,'  he  says,  '  never  can  be  rubbed  out.'  Now 
if  Thackeray  had  known  anything  at  all  about 
lithographers'  stones,  he  would  have  known  that 
they  are  used  continuously  for  new  writings  until 
they  have  become  too  thin  for  service.  Thackeray 
would  have  given  woman  more  of  the  benefit  of  the 
doubt  if  he  had  called  her  heart  a  palimpsest.  You 
sometimes  can  make  out  something  more  than  the 
very  last  writing  on  a  palimpsest." 

"  I  am  afraid,"  murmured  the  Professor,  with  a 
glance  that  puzzled  me,  "  that  you  would  not  be 
able  to  read  even  that  last  writing." 

"  Alas  !  Professor,  I  never  have  boasted  any  dex- 
terity as  an  expert  in  love's  handwriting." 

"  You  are  a  man,"  she  said  briefly. 

"  Is  there  a  last  writing  on  your  heart,  Pro- 
fessor ?  " 

"  Yes,"  she  answered,  a  little  startled,  yet  speak- 
ing quietly,  "  there  is  a  first  and  a  last  in  one,  and 
the  ink  isn't  dry,  either." 

204 


"  And  so  They  were  Married  " 


"  You  don't  mean  —  " 

"  Yes,  I  do,"  she  added  firmly ;  "  I  have  been 
intending  to  tell  you  about  it." 

"  You  are  —  not  going  to  be  —  married  ?  " 
"Yes." 

"  Professor  !  "  I  had  breath  but  for  that  one 
gasp.    "And  you  never  said  a  word!" 

"Yes,  I  did  —  to  him."  Then,  seeing  my  look, 
"  I  wanted  to  tease  you  a  little  ;  but  I  am  going  to 
tell  you  all  about  it  —  very  soon." 

"  I  suppose,"  I  said,  after  a  pause,  "  it  is  that 
fellow  who  was  hurt  at  Santiago  ?  " 

"The  very  same." 

There  was  a  little  awkward  silence.  Then  I 
arose  and  stood  near  her,  and  she  glanced  up  at 
me  with  a  droll,  fluttering  smile.  "  Does  he  under- 
stand women  ?  " 

"  No,"  she  replied  softly,  yet  with  some  of  her 
old  spirit,  "  he  isn  t  so  foolish  as  to  try.  He  only 
understands  —  me." 

"  Oh,"  I  said. 

It  was  dusk.  Somehow  the  moment  was  like 
the  end  of  a  chapter.  A  strange  thing  had  hap- 
pened, and  the  Professor  —  Who  can  describe  that 
change  which  follows  the  oldest  and  newest  of 
miracles  ?  It  was  not  the  same  Professor  who 
shimmered  there  in  the  twilight.  .  .  .  No,  not  the 
same.  Something  had  gone.  And  there  was  a 
new  light  in  those  dauntless  eyes. 


207 


Miss  America 


A  little  later  I  saw  her  at  the  door,  her  little 
gloved  hand  cajoling  for  a  moment  the  rebellious 
bronze  of  her  back  hair.  I  saw  her  through  the 
window  as  on  the  steps  she  gathered  the  loose 
of  her  gown,  flashing  the  lire  of  her  flounce  lining, 
I  saw  her  flicker  for  a  moment  in  the  windy  street. 
And  she  was  gone. 


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